Carl Jung & Buddhism On The Unconscious

The work of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung  and the ancient teachings of Gautama Buddha seem   to belong to different worlds. They originate from  completely different cultures, millennia apart,   and two opposite ends of the Earth. Yet something  more fundamental than these differences unites  
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them. That is, the conviction that man’s  wellbeing is rooted in the mind and that to   understand the mind is the key task of maturity. This shared interest in the psyche led both Jung   and Buddhism down similar paths of investigation.  Sometimes they reached similar conclusions,  
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sometimes they didn’t. But both discovered there  is much more to the mind than people realize. Both   arrived at what today we call the unconscious. In this video, we’ll compare the Jungian and the   Buddhist concepts of the unconscious. But not  in a dry, scholarly way. This video will be a  
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success if by the end you have gained some insight  into your own mind. So, with this goal in mind,   let’s jump right in. But before we get to the  unconscious, let’s start with consciousness.  The Buddha’s view of consciousness is  quite different from what most westerners  
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are familiar with. To him, consciousness is a  phenomenon that arises when sense organs and   sense objects come into contact. Now what does this mean?  The sense organs are six. There are the five  we know in the west: eyes, ears, tongue, skin,  
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and nose. But in Buddhism the mind counts as an  additional (sixth) sense organ. The corresponding   sense objects are images, sounds, tastes,  feelings (as in touch), smells – and thoughts.  Observe how here a thought is not something  the mind produces, but something that appears  
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to the mind. If we feel our thoughts are ‘our  thoughts’, originating from our ‘selves’, this   is as unenlightened as thinking the sounds we hear  originate in our ears. (Tinnitus aside.) Much of   the Buddhist practice of meditation is aimed at  breaking our habit of identifying with thoughts. 
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If you want to learn more about this, I suggest  you check out my earlier video on the no-self.  Anyway, you can think of sense organs  as locks and of sense objects as keys.   When the right key goes into the right lock, the  doors of perception open. Consciousness arises. 
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This model is extraordinary  for at least two reasons.  First, it presents consciousness without  any notion of a subject or a self. Buddhism   compares consciousness to fire. Fire is not an  independent ‘thing in itself’. Fire depends on  
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fuel to burn. If there’s no fuel, there can  be no fire. In this same way, if there are no   appropriate sense objects and sense organs  present, there can be no consciousness.  Compare this model with all those wisdom  traditions that view consciousness as a  
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primary essence. As some spiritual reality  that exists independently of time and space.   Immediately you will see how controversial the  Buddha’s theory of mind was. And it still is.  There’s another profound  implication of this model. 
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Our six sense organs can each only match  with one type of sense object. For example,   the eye cannot perceive smells, nor can our  skin feel colors. But there is no reason to   assume that the six types of sense objects  we perceive are the only ones that exist! 
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For example, a bat doesn’t have a sense organ  for sight, a plant (probably) doesn’t have   a sense organ for thoughts, and a mushroom  likely doesn’t have a sense organ for sounds.  To each of these types of organism, the  world appears in entirely different ways. 
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This would mean that the world of our everyday  experience is not objective in the least. It is   rather the product of what our bodies are able to  perceive with their limited sets of sense organs.   A blind man walking through the Louvre would only  see blackness. But this blackness is and remains  
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his reality. It is no less true than the reality  of a sighted person enjoying the works of art.  In this sense there is little difference  between what we call ‘the world’ and what   our bodies are able to process and construct in  our awareness. We can ever only experience the  
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limited representation of reality our bodies are  able to generate. The Buddha goes so far as to say   our bodies are our world. He says: ‘’In this fathom-long body,   with its perceptions and thoughts, I  proclaim the world to be…’ (A II 48) 
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This obviously goes against the whole  subject-object distinction we take   for granted in the West. Or as Lord Byron writes:  ‘Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a  part / Of me and of my soul, as I of them?’ 
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The point here is that the universe of which we  are a part has endowed us with limited resources   to perceive it, let alone understand it.  Our clearest perception of the world can   ever only be a low-resolution representation  of it. In effect, a new, private reality. What  
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would mountains, waves, and skies be if there  was no consciousness to perceive them as such?  The great presocratic philosopher Heraclitus  had much to say about how our perception   creates our world. You can check out my  video on him if you want to learn more. 
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The illusory feeling that humans perceive an  objective, external reality comes from the   circumstance that the only entities with which we  can discuss reality are yet other humans. And we   all have the same hardware and software. If any  among us get funny ideas about what reality is,  
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we put them away in asylums for the  insane. But the only real argument   in favor of the sane versus the insane is that  the former outnumber the latter. Reportedly. A   desperate argument if ever there was one. Anyway, here Jung would say okay… but… 
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Imagine a boy whose mother is cold and unloving.  This boy grows up and every time he meets a woman,   he goes out of his way to please her. Or he  takes the most innocent comment from her as   an offence aimed personally at him. So even after  the grown man’s mother is no longer present, the  
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sight of a woman triggers his childhood behavior. How can this be explained by the theory of sense   organs and sense objects? If the keys that  once unlocked certain traumas are no longer   present, how do these traumas keep arising? The disciples of the Buddha too came across  
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this problem in their own way. It became most  obvious for the Buddhist school of the Yogācāra,   which consisted of the most advanced  meditators the world has ever known.  The Yogācāra monks could enter such deep  states of meditation that their stream of  
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consciousness would come to a halt and all  mental afflictions would disappear. This   way they extinguished the three Buddhist  fires of desire, hatred, and ignorance.  The problem was, these states never lasted. As soon as they were out of meditation,  
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the monks discovered they were back to  their ordinary, unenlightened selves.  But how can desire, hatred, and ignorance reappear  after they have been extinguished? And how can   one’s stream consciousness reemerge in  the first place once it has stopped? 
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Or if we take dreaming as a Jungian  example, how and where does our   consciousness return from when we awake? For both Jung and the Yogācāra Buddhists these   kinds of questions pointed in the same direction. Consciousness alone is not sufficient to account  
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for human experience. There must be some  additional region of the mind which remains   active even when consciousness dissolves. This  background region must be what connects and   keeps track of all our momentary experiences. The Buddhists called this background of the  
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mind the ālayavijñāna, meaning  store-house consciousness.  Jung called it the unconscious.  He described it like this:  ‘Everything of which I know, but of which I am  not at the moment thinking;… everything perceived  
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by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind;  everything which, involuntarily and without paying   attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want to  do; all the future things that are taking shape   in me and will sometime come to consciousness;  all this is the content of the unconscious.’ 
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For both Jung and the Yogācāra Buddhists, the  unconscious is like what modern physicists   call dark matter. It is not something anyone  can observe directly (otherwise it would be   conscious), but it must exist to account for  the facts of reality. If this strikes you as  
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a desperate argument… you’re right.  Our best attempts to understand deep   reality can ever only be such: desperate. So what does the unconscious account for?  Well, how about… you! A self can only exist  because of the unconscious. Let me elaborate. 
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Consciousness is momentary. Hear this [BEEP].  Well, you were conscious of that sound for   a moment there, but now it’s gone. Now only the  memory of the sound remains and soon it too will   fade. This applies to all experiences you’ve  ever had. If you had only your consciousness,  
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there would be just a ceaseless stream  of disconnected experiences without any   narrative that connects them. Your mind would be  like a pot with the bottom taken out. No matter   how much experience is poured into it, it would  remain empty of concepts like ‘self’ and ‘world’. 
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This insight comes from the Yogācāra Buddhists.  They understood the sense of being a separate   self is a story we tell ourselves based on a  reservoir of experience we accumulate through   life. And where is this reservoir stored?  Not in consciousness, that’s for sure;  
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consciousness is the momentary contact of  sense organs with sense objects. So, our past   experiences must be recorded in an ālayavijñāna,  an unconscious storehouse of the mind.  So let’s sum-up the Yogācāra model. Conscious experience occurs when any  
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of the six sense organs come in contact with their  corresponding sense objects. These six streams of   experience are stitched together into one coherent  picture of the world through a seventh type of   consciousness. This is called the mānas-vijñāna  (meaning ‘mind consciousness’). In Jungian terms,  
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the mānas-vijñāna is the ego, the sense of  being a self that is experiencing a world.   The ego is vital for making sense of the  world even if it leads us to all kinds of   deluded behavior. After experiences get  conceptualized and related to the ego,  
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they finally sink down into the ālayavijñāna, the  unconscious storehouse of the mind. There, they   remain dormant until the right conditions trigger  them to arise to the surface of consciousness.  Let me give an example of  how this works in real life. 
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A boy bullies others at school. The mānas-vijñāna  extrapolates from these experiences a sense of   self that is sadistic and seeks power over others.  This gets imprinted into the storehouse of his   mind. When the child grows up, he enters the  corporate world. There, he sees how people in  
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power can bully their subordinates in all kinds  of subtle ways. This triggers his childhood   memories from the ālayavijñāna and inspires  him to climb the corporate ladder so he can   have power over others. Eventually, he becomes  a tyrannical boss and reinforces his sadistic  
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sense of self. These new experiences sink into  his unconscious and make it even more likely   he’ll repeat this behavior in the future. The Buddhists compare this process to how   rainwater gathers in channels on the ground.  The more time passes and the more it rains,  
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the deeper these channels get. Finally, they turn  into rivers. This is how with time our actions   become habits and our habits become our ‘selves’. Buddhists also use seeds as a metaphor. Our   unconscious is like the soil and our actions  and experiences are seeds that get planted  
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there. When the right conditions arise,  these seeds ripen into new actions and   experiences. This explains how our past stays  with us and determines our present and future.  A psychotherapist would inquire into  your childhood; a Buddhist would inquire  
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into your past lives. Whether you call it  trauma or karma, the principle is the same.  This is some profound insight into the human  psyche, but… There’s something missing. And   Jung would be the first one to point it out.  He discovered an additional aspect of the  
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unconscious the Buddhists never came across. Let’s take our previous example of the bully   that becomes a tyrannical boss. One night that man  has a horrible dream. In his dream, he walks into   a room of mirrors. In each mirror, he sees his  reflection committing terrible acts of violence.  
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The man wakes up from the dream horrified.  For the entirety of the next day, he can’t   shake off a feeling of guilt. He starts observing  his behavior at work and, to his shame, discovers   just how much of a jerk he is towards everyone. Now this is a made-up example, but I think we  
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can all relate to it. Our dreams sometimes show  us uncomfortable truths about ourselves that we   either can’t or won’t face in our waking lives. Jung called this unconscious compensation. What   he meant was that our unconscious seeks  to balance the activity of our conscious  
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mind. Borrowing from Newton, Jung tells us  every conscious action causes an equal and   opposite in direction reaction in the unconscious. Someone who acts violently could have dreams   that confront him with suppressed  feelings of guilt. On the other hand,  
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someone repressing her anger could have dreams  that encourage her to stand up for herself more.  If you’ve ever paid attention to your own dreams,  you will know this occurs. And yet the Yogācāra   model of the mind overlooks this entirely. In the Yogācāra view, the unconscious simply  
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stores and amplifies experience. Seeds of wrath  produce grapes of wrath. But as we can see from   our dreams, sometimes the unconscious  flips conscious experience on its head.  I think there’s an important reason why Jung  understood this but the Buddhists didn’t. 
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You see, the Yogācārins were only concerned with  how to end the unhealthy habits supported by the   ālayavijñāna. Beyond that, the unconscious was  of no interest to them. They knew how one can   purify consciousness here and now. But to put  an end to suffering for good, they wished to  
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learn how to cleanse the unconscious.  That’s as far as their interest went.  Jung, on the other hand, saw the unconscious  as a source of wisdom and guidance. He knew   it contained much more than waking consciousness  and he wanted to learn from it. This attitude led  
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him in a direction the Buddhists never  thought to go. It made him ask one of   his deepest and most controversial questions. Jung asked: ‘If consciousness dreams and sinks   into the unconscious… could the unconscious also  dream and sink into an even deeper unconscious?’ 
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It was this strange question that led Jung to his  greatest discovery: the collective unconscious.  The collective unconscious is such a deep and  controversial idea that to go into it would   make this video twice as long as it already is.  But we cannot leave it out completely either. 
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Remember how Jung and the Buddhists discovered  the unconscious? They observed that consciousness   itself is too limited to account for all  its contents. The conclusion was that these   contents must be coming from somewhere else  – some deeper and hidden region of the mind. 
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Well, Jung continued this same  reasoning one step further.  He observed his patients’ dreams mostly  referred to their personal experiences,   like our example with the bully. That’s  to be expected. But to Jung’s amazement,  
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sometimes his patients dreamt of things that  had nothing to do with their personal lives.   Sometimes their dreams contained obscure elements  from world culture and literature. Ancient gods,   alchemical images, Mesopotamian myths… How could  people dream of things they had no knowledge of? 
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The more dreams he analyzed, the more  convinced Jung became. There must be an   even deeper region of the mind under one’s  personal unconscious. This region somehow   contains all that has ever been experienced by  the human mind and it is common to all people.  
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Perhaps even, it is common to animals too. Jung called this the collective unconscious.   A great storehouse of psychic content that is  the birthplace of all our individual psyches.  Because we are connected in such a way, everything  an individual can experience can be experienced  
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also collectively. The Enlightenment, the  Nazi movement, the Protestant revolution…   These are all examples of how large groups  of people can act as a single individual   possessed by an idea or an emotional state. The collective unconscious is a network  
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in which we are all connected. Our  actions both arise from and contribute   to the network of all individual minds. This is obviously a controversial idea.   And it would have terrified the Buddhists. Not only is there one’s consciousness that  
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must be liberated… and not only must one’s  unconscious be liberated… But there’s also   the collective unconscious of all sentient  beings that must be freed from suffering.  How could you possibly heal the  collective karma of all sentient beings? 
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Well, perhaps, on some level, the Buddhists  did understand this. This would explain the   bodhisattva vow. In the Mahayana tradition,  a monk vows to delay his own enlightenment   until the day all sentient beings are  liberated from suffering. He vows: 
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The unrescued I will rescue The unliberated I will liberate  The uncomforted I will comfort Those who have not yet reached [final]nirvana,   I will cause to attain [final]nirvana Mahayana Buddhism recognizes its project can never  
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succeed if even a single sentient being remains  in ignorance and suffering. Is this an intuition   of what Jung called the collective unconscious? I believe all the world’s mystics teach us that   on some deep level we are all like leaves on a  tree. The many leaves create the illusion of many  
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beings. But in the end, there is only the one,  only the tree living itself through each of us.   We must credit Jung with his serious attempt to  give a scientific expression to this idea. No   wonder his critics accused of mysticism. We’ve covered lots of ground here, but really,  
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we have just scratched the surface of both  Jungian and Buddhist theory of mind. We’ve   not even mentioned the Jungian archetypes  and complexes or explored Buddhist karma   and rebirth. I leave these for future videos. I hope you walk away from this knowing your  
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mind is much more mysterious and complex  than it seems. And what you call ‘I’ is but   the tip of an iceberg that goes so deep  it might end up being what we call God.  Thank you for spending your time here with me!  This video took me weeks to write and edit and  
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if you’d like to support my work please  consider becoming a patron on Patreon or   a member here on YouTube. And do share this  video with anyone you think would enjoy it.  In any case, I wish you all the best, and  remember, ‘What you seek is seeking you’.