This is one the introductory chapters of a rather ambitious book that I am writing that is provisionally entitled ‘Mandala of Love – A Tantric Buddhist model of Mind and Meditation Practice’. In the previous chapter, which you can read here, I introduce two important Dharmic frameworks – the Trikāya Doctrine and Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’. I recommend that you read that chapter first. I find the trikāya to be a fundamental framework for understanding Buddhism, and find that it provides a useful doorway into an understanding of the Buddha’s notion of a Middle Way – an idea that we need to be able to understand deeply and broadly, as both a philosophical principle and an approach to practice.     

I want to emphasise, as I did in my preface to the previous article, that the approach to understanding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ that I am offering here, is a very personal one – I might even say that it is a maverick view. While I may share my thoughts with some conviction, I am not asserting a definitive interpretation. I only want to contribute to the discussion.

This chapter is, in large part, a response to the powerfully explanatory ‘Three Myths’ model (‘self-development’, ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’) that was presented by Sangharakshita’s student, Dharmachari Subhuti, in 2003. Not a ‘model’ as such, this is a conceptual framework that many who know the history of the Buddhist tradition will be familiar with. I find it very engaging because I believe that it illuminates important universal truths. Indeed, this conceptualisation – a fresh naming of the three main strands of philosophy and practice within the Buddhist tradition – presents Buddhism as containing three nested archetypal perspectives. Like many others, I have adapted the model to some extent, as I have made use of it to explain the way I have come to think about Dharma practice. Once again, my presentation of this conceptual framework should be regarded only as a personal view, and as a stimulus to reflection and discussion – and certainly not as definitive in any way.

This chapter contains a lot of reflections that may seem very personal to my particular process of learning within Buddhism, which was perhaps somewhat unusual. It does however contain a lot of challenging insights that seem to me to be universal and generally applicable. Although these understandings have been difficult to adequately articulate, they seem to me, when I look at what is currently happening in our world, to be extremely urgent and important. I welcome comments, if anyone wants to write to me via the contact form.

 

In this chapter, I shall be continuing to introduce the Trikāya Doctrine and Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’. I shall also be making use of Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model, which I introduced at the end of my last chapter, as a way of exploring the dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ in Dharma practice. In his ‘Three Myths’ talk (2003) and article (2004), Subhuti set out to draw our attention to the way Dharma practice, for Western practitioners, tends to progress in a way that begins with a ‘self-power’ emphasis (an archetypal perspective that has been called the ‘self-development’ myth); and then moves to incorporate an ‘other-power’ dimension (an archetypal perspective that has been called the ‘self-surrender’ myth); and then moves to an approach that transcends the apparent dichotomy of the two previous stages (an archetypal perspective that has been called the ‘self-discovery’ myth).

The ‘Three Myths’ framework gives us a way of understanding the three yānas – Hinayāna; Mahayāna; Vajrayāna –  the three phases of the historical evolution of Buddhism. Even more significantly however, it shows us how the corresponding shifts of apparent emphasis within Buddhist philosophy are reflected in our own evolving practice. Following Subhuti’s archetypal approach to this enquiry, I also want to reflect further on the need for those of us who aspire to be more conscious, to gain a capacity for this sort of archetypal psychological reflection. By this, I do not mean only an awareness of the archetypal Buddhas of the sambhogakāya. We also need to be keenly aware of the corresponding ‘negative’ archetypal imagery of the Buddhist tradition’s ‘Six Realms’ – the archetypes that show us the egoic mind’s dysfunction. This is a theme that I shall be covering in more detail in later chapters. In this two-part essay, my focus shall be on an exploration of Subhuti’s three archetypal perspectives.

This three-fold archetypal analysis generates a vast amount of reflection for me. I have a lot of criticism to share in regard to the ‘self-development’ perspective – a perspective that becomes very problematic when it is practiced in isolation, especially if it also being practiced in an extreme way – and I shall be highlighting the great need for us to aspire to a three-fold synthesis of the three archetypal perspectives. The adoption, as our sole frame of reference for understanding Buddhism, of the philosophically narrow and one-sided ‘self-development’ view can be disastrous. Because the necessary Middle Way balance to the ‘self-development’ view is found in the ‘self-surrender’ view, we need to get experientially clear as to what that means. This is why I prefer to use the term ‘other-power’ in connection with the ‘self-surrender’ perspective. We need to be very clear what we are surrendering to. We need to be clear that we are surrendering to the objectively existing dharmic ‘other-power’ of the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya – not simply to a constructed ideal that the heroic ego has imagined, or to the authority of those who represent the Buddhist tradition.

Presenting a three-fold view that offers the potential for a reconciliation of the dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’, I shall be offering a perspective on the Vajrayāna. Tibetan Vajrayāna is culturally extraordinarily rich and complex – so much so, that Western practitioners can sometimes miss what is most essential and most valuable in the tradition. Hopefully cutting through some of that cultural complexity, I shall be seeking that essence of Vajrayāna that was present, I believe, at various times, in Gautama Buddha’s teachings – most notably in his characterisation of his teaching as a ‘Middle Way’.

I shall be presenting Vajrayāna as a mode of practice that aspires to a transcendence of ‘self-power’ / ‘other-power’ dichotomy – a mode of practice that incorporates, but also transcends, both the heroic idealism of ‘self-power’ (the ‘self-development’ myth), and the devotional-receptive ‘other-power’ perspective (the ‘self-surrender’ myth). For me, the term ‘self-discovery’ does not begin to encompass the subtlety and profundity of the Vajrayāna perspective, but a conceptual label that would do it justice would be hard to find – so I hope that my provisional use of the term Vajrayāna for the three-fold view, will itself serve us as an adequate conceptual label. This third way, or Middle Way, that I am, perhaps rather confusingly, calling Vajrayāna, is found in every part of the Buddhist tradition. Wherever a true ‘other-power’ Buddhism is practiced, there exists the possibility of this experiential reconciliation of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’; of nirmānakāya and dharmakāya; of conditioned and unconditioned; and of samsara and nirvāna – and it is that reconciliatory view, and that reconciliatory approach to practice, that I am calling Vajrayāna.

The Buddhist path looks very different at the end than it does at the beginning. Indeed, it is common for Dharma practitioners to look back after decades of practice, and realise that their previous years of passionate engagement with the Dharma were informed by various egoic delusions – various misunderstandings or partial truths that had been constraining their progress. We may even realise that, in our idealistic striving, we were sometimes striving for the wrong things. We may become aware that we have created conflict for ourselves. We may even have to accept that we had, a times, put our trust in people who were ultimately not worthy of the degree of trust that we placed in them.

We may find that an un-discerning trust in the reliability of the guidance of our teachers is held up to us as a virtue. The Buddhas own teaching in this regard was in stark contrast. He urged us to regard all teachings, including his own (and interpretations of his own teachings) as provisional – as hypotheses to be tested in our experience. Every aspect of spiritual teaching, from our basic meditation practices and ethical precepts to the highest metaphysical teachings, must be subjected to this testing process. Indeed the spiritual life can be seen as a progressive process in which we gradually refine our understanding through the rigour of this testing process. The teaching frameworks of various strands of the Buddhist tradition are nirmānakāya phenomena – they are imperfect and provisional. It is only by deep contemplation and scrutiny, and by seeking to realise the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya realities behind the teachings, that we can discern the truth.

The whole Buddhist tradition has engaged in this testing and refinement process over the twenty-five centuries of its history. Indeed, it has been through several major ‘life-review processes’ collectively, and has sometimes recognised that its earlier conceptualisations were inadequate or incomplete. The Buddhist tradition’s development through three cultural and historical phases – Hinayāna, Mahayāna and Vajrayāna – may be seen both as a consequence of a natural self-critical and reflective process, and as a natural collective evolution in which the archetypal realities of the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya were being articulated more and more clearly over time in the concrete nirmānakāya world of the recorded Buddhist teachings and associated culture.

So, via processes that involved both rigorous introverted thinking and an ongoing conceptual clarification of the traditions teachings, on one side; and direct visionary revelation of the sambhogakāya level of mind, on the other, the tradition underwent a process of improvement and integration. These processes are now entering a whole new phase of consolidation, as centuries of traditional teachings are analysed by Westerners, and are becoming integrated with compatible currents within Western culture and Western psychological thought.

There is much that needs to be said as we attempt to distinguish these three philosophical attitudes within Buddhism. My wish here is to promote more nuanced and discerning reflection – not to confirm stereotypes. Firstly, we need to acknowledge that the term Hinayāna (‘Lesser Vehicle’) is a pejorative one used by the Mahayāna (‘Greater Vehicle’) as it sought to validate the emerging devotional-receptive practices, and the ‘other-power’ emphasis, that had appeared within the tradition. This was a perspective in which Enlightenment was seen to be embodied in the compassionate and altruistic figure of the bodhisattva, and seen to be a collective and cultural project – one that was in some important but difficult-to-define sense centred ‘outside’ of us, as if a wise and compassionate energy were pervading the universe like an infinite golden light. Clearly however, the teachings of the historical Buddha were not ‘Lesser’. The Mahayāna was only pointing out that it was offering a more culturally developed expression – an ultimately more complete and effective expression of Gautama Buddha’s teachings and of the Buddha’s compassionate intention.

Secondly, we need to be clear that the distinctions that we usually make between the three yānas, are distinctions of cultural emphasis – not distinctions relating to the fundamentals of what Enlightenment is. There is certainly no absolute correspondence between, on one side, the cultural and historical movements of Hinayāna, Mahayāna, and Vajrayāna within Buddhism, and on the other side, the three perspectives of ‘self-development’ (self-power), ‘self-surrender’ (other-power), and ‘self-discovery’, to use Subhuti’s terms – even if those correspondences may sometimes be seen. Both the Hinayāna and Mahayāna sought – and indeed found, in their own ways – the Middle Way reconciliation that we see most clearly articulated in the Vajrayāna. So, please be clear that it is not my intention to narrowly identify Theravada Buddhism with the ‘self-development’ perspective.

 

 

It has been argued by some, that practitioners ‘should’ begin by practicing for several years in the spirit of the heroic ‘self-development’ myth – I have heard 15 years suggested, and I find myself disagreeing strongly. I am certainly not saying that this is Subhuti’s current view – only that this is a view that is taken by some who present commentary on his framework. Indeed, what I take from Subhuti’s valuable reflections, is the opposite – a warning that the ‘self-development’ perspective is only a myth, and therefore should not be viewed as if it can serve us as the foundational perspective. Because it is only one archetypal point of view among three archetypal perspectives that we must endeavour to combine if we are to truly practice the Middle Way, there are actually several significant dangers in practicing it in isolation. The value of calling these perspectives ‘myths’ is in the way that the word ‘myth’ highlights the fact that these three approaches, while they each have an archetypal basis, represent only partial truths – delusions even – if they are not made fully conscious, and brought together into a fully integrated three-fold model.

In the East, the most widely practiced form of Buddhism is what we can call ‘other-power’ Buddhism. This approach goes some way to combining the first two ‘myths’ – the ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ perspectives. ‘other-power’ Buddhism could be characterised as archetypally somewhat similar to Christianity in some ways – because the power to gain salvation is projected out onto archetypal Buddha figures like Amitabha (called Amida Buddha in Japan), the Buddha of Love, who is worshiped in order to gain rebirth in his heavenly Pure Land. This perspective, where Enlightenment is projected out, lacks the philosophical subtlety of the Vajrayāna. In the Vajrayāna, the practitioner ‘takes back the projection’ and endeavours to recognise that Enlightenment, although it is beyond the egoic mind, is nevertheless ‘within’ the practitioner’s experience at the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya levels of mind.

From the point of view of the Western ‘self-development’ perspective, the three-fold perspective that I am choosing to call Vajrayāna, can be seen as a sub-species of, or further refinement of, an ‘other-power’, or ‘self-surrender’ perspective on practice. This means that the process by which the Westerner enters into a true ‘other-power’ perspective is of enormous importance – indeed it is the doorway to the Middle Way. As Westerners, we cannot jump straight from a heroic ‘self-development’ view to the Vajrayāna view. If we try to do this, then our practice is likely to contain deep incongruities, since the heroic ‘self-development’ view and the Vajrayāna view are so radically different as to be incompatible – and impossible to combine without the prior establishment of the ‘other-power’ view, as I shall be explaining later.

The ‘self-development’ view is the most limited of the three ‘myths’, but many Western students of Buddhism adopt it as if if were the only valid perspective, and as if it completely encapsulates the essence of the Buddha’s teachings. These students are usually unaware however, that they are closing themselves to the other two perspectives, and that they are closing themselves to a deeper understanding – a deeper understanding which is actually essential to the Buddha’s Middle Way teaching and to Buddhist wisdom in general. It is as if Western students tend not to recognise that the ‘self-development’ approach, even if it is directed towards Buddhism’s ideals of altruism and self-transcendence, is actually very close to the ordinary goal-orientated partial-consciousness of the egoic mind. This means that the practitioners of this approach are very prone to errors of judgment and to confusion about the nature of the Dharma.

Being aware that everything arises according to conditions, and then studying those processes of conditionality and applying strategies for adjusting those conditions so that our lives are happier, has a place in Buddhist practice, but it is not in itself enough if we a seeking deep transformation. There is very much more to the Buddha’s path. This is why I took time to introduce the trikāya doctrine in my first chapter. We need to understand Buddhism as a Middle Way path, which engages with both the mundane processes of conditionality at work within this nirmānakāya level of mind and world; and also with the transcendental, or dharmic level – seeking to recognise and acknowledge the objective dharmic dimension, that is also always actively at work in our experience of mind and world.

The sambhogakāya and dharmakāya levels, which can together be called the dharmic reality, can, from a relative point of view, be thought of as ‘beyond the egoic mind’ and ‘beyond this world’ – even though they are ever-present in our experience of the nirmānakāya level. So, in the trikāya doctrine, this dharmic level of mind is presented as having two levels – an eternal and almost unknowable dharmakāya; and an archetypal sambhogakāya, where the eternal dharmakāya finds expression in our experience as archetypal imagery and bodily-felt knowing. There can be no real wisdom and no radical transformation without some engagement with these transcendental dimensions of mind – dimensions that an exclusively ‘self-development’ approach generally fails to adequately acknowledge. And, as I explained, in my last chapter, the ‘mandala wisdom’ of the sambhogakāya, because it is the intermediate level between the mundane and conditioned nirmānakāya and the eternal and unconditioned dharmakāya, can be thought as containing the essence of the Middle Way – and containing the keys to that reconciliation that we call Enlightenment.

A ‘myth’ is a collective story that has the power to shape our collective psychological culture. As Carl Jung explained so well however, if we are not aware of the myths that inform our culture, our values, and our ideas, we are in psychological danger – and our society is in danger also. One of the profound challenges presented by Subhuti in his ‘Three Myths’ talk and paper, was his direct reference to these dangers. He pointed out that each archetypal perspective has what we may call a ‘Shadow side’, to use Jung’s terminology. Subhuti referred to each myth as having a ‘front’, which is conscious, and a ‘back’, which is unconscious.

Given that Jung’s notion of the Shadow archetype is now well-established in the conceptual and metaphorical language of most educated and reflective people in the modern world, I much prefer to use that more common, and perhaps now universal, conceptual label, in relation to this important psychological dynamic. The value of the word Shadow is that it acknowledges that we are addressing a psycho-spiritual dynamic that is universal, and therefore archetypal. The metaphorical image of a bright light casting a dark shadow speaks more eloquently to our understanding than does the much more neutral conceptual pairing of ‘front’ and ‘back’. The fact that a brighter light casts a darker shadow adds a depth of meaning to the metaphor.

I have written elsewhere (here), drawing on my own experience, about these possible Shadow expressions within the Buddhist tradition. It is of the nature of the egoic mind that consciousness tends to create a complementary Shadow – tends to create areas of cognitive-perceptual unconsciousness, or blind-spots. Until we have progressed a very long way on the path, and achieved a very high level of integrity and self-awareness, we all have areas of empathy failure, or are seen to be manifesting actions of body, speech and mind that are incongruous with our conscious identity and ideals. This is the nature of the egoic mind.

As spiritual practitioners, most of us are idealists by temperament. We therefore need to maintain a high level of vigilance and humility in regard to the possibility of psychological Shadow – we need the high level of Mindfulness that the Buddha always advocated. I am talking here about the ‘vigilant’ awareness (apramada) that the Buddha urged his students to engage in, both throughout his teaching life and in his very last discourse. This sort of watchfulness for the complementary opposite to our conscious attitude, is especially appropriate and necessary if we find ourselves seized by the high idealism of the bodhisattva ideal – or dabbling in what we imagine to be the Vajrayāna.

It is not always sufficiently appreciated that idealism can be psychologically disintegrating – that an egoic identification with an ideal might actually make us less aware, rather than more aware, of that in us which is incongruous with that ideal. This however, is an absolutely fundamental understanding without which the notion of Integration – the foundational stage in the System of Practice – cannot be fully understood. It is essential that we understand the way egoic consciousness divides the psyche. Egoic consciousness is structured in such a way that it always tends to value some cognitive-perceptual functions and devalue others, often exiling the resulting less developed and therefore more difficult-to-acknowledge aspects of personality, so completely that we can speak of them, in the metaphorical language of archetypal psychology, as Shadow.

It is a fact of egoic consciousness that those complementary cognitions and perceptions are part of the personality, but in compensatory and unconscious ways. It is not inevitable that these polar-opposite psychological cognitions and perceptions are antagonistic to our conscious attitudes, but the more narrowly our approach is guided by the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, the more we see this tendency. Importantly, the Shadow attitudes and behaviours are usually ‘projected’ onto others – so that we erroneously perceive in others aspects of our own character that we are failing to recognise. One way or another, it is not uncommon for a person whose approach to personal development is predominantly idealistic and heroic (i.e. expressing the ‘self-development’ orientation) to find themselves living out patterns of unethical behaviour that are deeply incongruous with their consciously-held values and aspirations.

One of the characteristics by which we can distinguish Shadow projection, is the intensity of emotion that accompanies the projected Shadow cognition or perception – usually a furious anger or a violent non-rational condemnation. One of the dangers of an overly heroic (i.e. ‘self-development’ orientated) Buddhist cultural situation is that this sort of emotional expression becomes normalised – seen as a normal and positive expression given the intensity of personal will-power that is being expressed in all aspects of practice. Within the psychological world of the heroic practitioner, relationships with our inner mental objects tend to be framed in heroic terms, and as a fight to gain dominance and control over negative mental states – or as a struggle to replace ‘bad’ mental states with ‘good’ ones.

This heroic internal fight is usually felt, in a way that is not fully conscious, to be a reflection of the great cosmic fight of good against evil; a fierce struggle in which that which has been identified as ‘bad’ must be condemned and destroyed. The heroic spirit of this noble inner fight for dominance and control unfortunately tends to spill out, so that it colours the relationships in our external life. Indeed, it cannot not effect the quality and tone of our relationships with others in the outer world. It is therefore very easy, within the framework of the heroic, to fall into the idea that people who are deemed to be expressing negative mental states must be made to change. Within the habitual Western perspective of the heroic, even Buddhists find themselves reducing ethical questions to absolute polarities of good and bad, or right and wrong – and given that context, it is not surprising that we also see the assertion of a sometimes violent authority by those who believe they are right. I hope to be able to point out in the course of this chapter, just how deeply rooted in the Western collective unconscious is this mentality of judgement and punishment in the guise of benevolence and wisdom.

My observation of these sorts of attitudes and behaviours, in those Buddhist communities and projects where there has been an intense focus on the heroic ‘self-development’ approach to practice, has left me feeling very keenly the need to promote an awareness of the limitations of this perspective. Although the context of these sorts of attitudes and behaviours may be Buddhist, the negative mental states and the un-Mindfulness that are generated are often no different from those in any other high-pressure human work situation, but they are likely to be even worse – the identification with the Hero archetype inevitably makes them worse. The identification with the good, and the projection of evil, serves to maintain an emotional intensity and internal blindness.

My observation and reflection upon the incongruous dynamics that the ‘self-development’ perspective appears to generate, has created a lot of quite disturbing understandings for me – not only in regard to Buddhist practice, and in regard to the nature of the egoic mind in general, but in regard to the history and current geopolitics of the modern West. For me, one of the keys that opens up this area of archetypal psychological understanding is an appreciation of the significant difference between the collective psyche of the East and the collective psyche of the West – an idea that I shall be returning to.

I was profoundly encouraged when I first came across Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ analysis of Buddhism. One of the powerful implications that his conceptualisations highlighted for me, was that if we are encouraged to see the spiritual path exclusively in terms of either heroic ‘self-development’ or heroic ‘self-surrender’, and simultaneously discouraged from engaging with the more subtle and more reflective path of ‘self-discovery’, we may be in great danger psychologically, because both of the first two ‘myths’ can show themselves to have a dark Shadow side – a Shadow which may only be fully recognised when we begin to practice on the level of ‘self-discovery’. We may be in especially great danger if we engage with elements of Tibetan Vajrayāna practice, while actually framing those practices within the reductive psychological worldview of the heroic ‘self-development’ myth.

This is not just an intellectual exercise for me. I have seen the Shadow of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective playing out in Buddhist cultural settings, both in my own life and in the lives of fellow practitioners who I love. I know from my own experience, that when it is adopted as an exclusive and complete model for spiritual development, the heroic ‘self-development’ myth can lead to tragedy. When this happens, when it suddenly becomes clear that the idealistic and heroic frame of reference has actually led to psychological harm and to forms of violence, those involved are naturally surprised and confused. It may take them years to understand and process what went wrong – for me, it took several decades. There may be superficial analyses which identify ‘bad’ individuals and place blame, but what is required is a systemic analysis – an archetypal analysis – of the sort that Dharmachari Subhuti appears to be presenting.

Witnessing those experiences, and reflecting on them deeply using both the conceptual tools of Buddhism and those of archetypal psychology, has convinced me that we cannot afford to fall into the idea that the ‘self-development’ perspective can serve as our foundational perspective. Rather we need to recognise that the ‘self-power’ assumptions of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective are merely the egoic mind’s prevailing assumptions in the cultural context of the West. The more refined forms of spiritual ignorance that we get when the egoic mind embraces a heroic spiritual idealism, may look like dramatic spiritual progress, but without the balance provided by the ‘other-power’ perspective, it is still ignorance, and certainly not an expression of the Buddha’s Middle Way. The dramatic and grandiose sense of knowing and bearing passionate witness to the truth that is so characteristic of the heroic, often hides an even darker form of ignorance, precisely because it believes it is so wise. To be heroically identified with wisdom is a very dangerous thing – it is a reversal of the natural order of things. We should seek the Middle Way path of wisdom first. If, when wisdom arises, we are seized by the spirit of the bodhisattva, we may, or may not, appear heroic – but inwardly we will have gone far beyond the ‘self-development’ perspective.

Several interpreters of Subhuti’s ‘Three-Myths’ model like to replace his modest and, I would say, appropriate conceptual label of ‘development’ or ‘self-development’, with another one – ‘self-transcendence’. I do not believe this term serves to improve or clarify Subhuti’s three-fold conceptualisation – indeed I find it grandiose and somewhat misleading. Those adopting the heroic ‘self-development’ attitude do indeed often believe they are engaged in self-transcendence, but that belief is challenged by the logic of Subhuti’s three-fold model – which identifies the exclusive ‘self-development’ approach as only the first of three possible perspectives on self-transcendence, which need to be combined. These three perspectives need to be integrated if significant self-transcendence is to be achieved, and if we are to avoid manifesting the Shadow side of the heroic. Indeed, it could be argued that the use of a term as broad as ‘self-transcendence’ for a perspective that is as limited as the ‘self-development’ view, is symptomatic of the psychological inflation that plagues those who adopt this perspective exclusively. (I shall provide a definition of what I mean by ‘inflation’ later in this chapter.) The implication of Subhuti’s article is, after all, that we need to question whether significant self-transcendence can actually be achieved if we are not incorporating all three perspectives into our practice in an integrated way.

It is important to acknowledge once again that, while the ‘self-power’ (‘self-development’) approach tends to be embraced as the default in the West, the ‘other-power’ (‘self-surrender’) approach tends to embraced as the default in India, the Himalayas and the Far East. Interestingly, Theravada Buddhism tends to have a ‘self-power’ emphasis however. It would seem that this emphasis was developed to provide a counterpoint to the general ‘other-power’ spiritual culture of the East out of which it evolved. At worst, all these different religious cultures may be recognised as tending towards one-sided styles of engagement, reflecting, among other cultural differences, the cultural extraversion of the West and the cultural introversion of the East. The Middle Way is subtle and deep – it is a way of thinking about how we might express something of the ultimate reconciliation that is characteristic of the non-dual goal of Enlightenment, in the balance of our approach to philosophy and practice. It is perhaps not surprising that actual cultural expressions of a true Middle Way balance are fairly rare and difficult to achieve.

The Middle Way is a process in which we acknowledge and reconcile archetypal opposites. So, it is not one thing. Rather we need to think of it is a method – a method that we apply repeatedly. It is like a fractal pattern – it applies to the overall picture of our process, and also applies to every tiny detail of our process. In this book, I would like to outline how it can serve us in this way, as an experiential guide to the overall process of meditation practice and also to each of the many moments, of which our meditation practice consists. We need to see it as a guiding principle in every moment of Mindfulness. For me, it points to a difficult-to-define openness of being – a way of being that is not either cognitively or perceptually one-sided. I have come to think of it as a path of ‘resting as Consciousness’ – of relinquishing the egoic perspective and resting on the experiential threshold of Consciousness, so that complementary opposites are allowed to emerge and be integrated. So, within the framework of the Middle Way, Integration is not just an appropriation of psychological powers to the egoic self – rather it specifically requires an ‘other-power’ attitude that gratefully acknowledges the blessing of the new awareness and life energy that we continuously receive from beyond the egoic mind.

Jack Kornfield, attempting to encapsulate this Middle Way openness of being in simple language, called it a Path with Heart. He is someone who trained in a Thai monastery, and initially struggled to apply what he had learned to life in the West. He used this non-traditional idea of A Path with Heart as the title and central theme of his 1993 book of that name. We all need to find our own way to this place of restful openness to what is beyond the egoic self, and the notion of allowing the heart to rest and open is probably a very good experiential pointer for many of us – especially if we have become overly heroic, or overly influenced by the Theravada’s cultural emphasis on ‘striving’. It is important that we recognise, that in the Buddha’s seeming emphasis on ‘striving’, he was deliberately offering a ‘self-power’ contradiction to the prevailing ‘other-power’ perspective of his ancient Indian students. He was offering a ‘self-development’ balance to the ancient Indian cultural tendency – which was so strongly orientated towards a devotional-receptive ‘self-surrender’ view of spirituality.

We need to understand that what the Buddha was trying to bring was a Middle Way balance and synthesis within his ancient Indian student’s approach to practice – and we must then also recognise that his advice in the context of the heroic culture of the modern West would also be to urge a Middle Way balance, but in an entirely different and opposite way. It is a complete mistake, in my view, to take the cultural emphasis that we see in the ancient Indian context of the Pali Canon, and apply it in the Western context without reflection. We cannot afford to ignore, as we generally do, the vast difference between the cultural and collective unconscious realities of ancient India and the corresponding dimensions of mind and culture in the modern West. Studied superficially, by Westerners, Early Buddhism appears to have a ‘self-power’ emphasis. While this emphasis served as a Middle Way counterpoint to the ‘other-power’ spiritual culture of ancient India, it may not be best-suited to the needs of many Westerners – who are usually already strongly ‘self-power’ orientated, and may derive more benefit from a Middle Way balance to that through forms of ‘other-power’ practice. I shall be returning to this theme – we need to reinforce this foundational understanding.

The notion of ‘heart’ as a way of evoking a sense of the spiritually mature individual’s willingness to open beyond the perspective of the egoic will, deserves further reflection before we move on. The word ‘heart’ has poetry and power – to have heart is to have empathy and generosity of spirit. It is often used in a rather vague way, however. In the Vajrayāna context it is also sometime used as an idiom in this way, but is more often used to communicate a much more precise meaning and association. The heart in Vajrayāna is not just the physical heart, or the poetic heart. Rather it is a ‘chakra’ – a special bodily-felt location in the energetic anatomy of the body. As we go deeper in meditation, we recognise the centre of the chest as a very particular somatic location – the place where we begin to register a sense of our openness or closedness to that which is beyond the purview of the egoic will. This is too big a subject to go into here – I shall be addressing it in a later chapter – but this is highly relevant to our current theme of seeking to understand the place of the personal will in spiritual practice. There is a volitional dimension of the mind (the samskaras skandha) and we accumulate egoic kleshas (bodily-felt emotional-energetic somatic patterning) in association with that volitional dimension. The momentum of that volitional aspect of the mind is felt in the area of the heart chakra – and when, in our practice, we find balance and ‘self-surrender’ by connecting deeply with the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic dimension, the heart is the place where that surrender to ‘other-power’ is felt.

The path of self-transcendence that the Buddha taught was the Middle Way path of reconciliation – a vastly more subtle philosophical approach than we see in the exclusive ‘self-development’ orientation (or the exclusively ‘other-power’ one). If, as Western Buddhists seeking to discern the Buddha’s Middle Way, we are to be true to the actual depth, breadth and philosophical sophistication of the Buddhist tradition, we need, in my view, to critique the heroic ‘self-development’ approach, and understand its Shadow side, and highlight its particular dangers in the Western cultural context. When we go deeper into the archetypal psychology of the Hero – the archetype behind the ‘self-development’ perspective – the dangers become clear. Since my twenties, I have found that my study of archetypal psychology, concurrently with my study of Buddhism, has allowed me to bring a critical perspective that I have not seen elsewhere. Indeed, it has become my conviction that archetypal psychology offers a mode of critical analysis that is greatly needed if we are to understand how Buddhism might be adapted to a Western cultural situation without losing its essential Buddhist character on one hand, and without falling prey to the Shadow elements in Western collective psychology on the other.

What I am saying then, and what, I believe Subhuti is saying by implication, is that if we are to practice Buddhism in a Western psychological context, we need to have a discerning and morally vigilant awareness of the mythology that informs the Western collective psychological context of our practice. We may believe that we can leave the collective psychology of Western culture behind and adopt the collective psychology of the Buddhist East instead. Unfortunately, the collective psyche is a reality that cannot be swept aside in this way by our conscious intentions and aspirations. In the West, for example, while there is no longer a near-universal embrace of the mythology and collective mind-set of Christianity, the archetypes that animated that tradition remain in the collective unconscious. I am thinking of the archetypes that found expression in Christ’s torture to death on a cross; in the Christian eradication of Paganism; in the heroic ‘holy war’ of the crusades; and in the torture to death or simple slaughter of those with divergent spiritual views. The collective psychological energies that led to these events are still with us. All these historical processes were manifestations of a heroic spirituality and they arose from an underlying archetypal pattern – as did the rise of Nazism, which may be understood as a manifestation of the even older European war-god archetypes, which also found expression in Christianity. Archetypal psychology allows us to factor in these psychological influences – influences that are very profound, but are often especially deeply unconscious because they exist in us at the collective level of the mind.

A comprehensive analysis of the collective, or archetypal, forces that are at play within Western culture, would require a whole separate book, or a series of books, but I feel a need to give a little time in these introductory chapters to an acknowledgement of this issue of the collective psychological context of the Western Buddhist practitioner. Indeed, we need to reflect on both the West’s, and on Buddhism’s, archetypal background, and to consider how these have the potential to interact in dysfunctional ways – or at least to cause us to misrepresent Buddhism when it is practiced in a Western context. As a passionate believer in the possibility of a significant cultural renewal in the West through a Western Buddhism, I want to help my readers to have a good understanding, not only of the nature of the egoic mind, viewed through the lens of archetypal psychology, but also of how the Shadow side of the archetypal patterns that have shaped Western culture can prevent us from realising that possibility.

Archetypal psychology is a style of psychological investigation that, while it looks in detail at all manifestations of the mythic in our personal lives, also steps back and observes the wide sweep of culture and history. This wide anthropological sweep provides us with the data points that lead us to recognise the archetypes that are shaping the collective unconscious of different cultures – in this case, the culture of the West, and that of ancient India. Perhaps inevitably therefore, I am going to make some ‘sweeping statements’ – some generalisations – but I shall be endeavouring to back these up with sufficient evidence, both from observation of individual psychological processes in people that I have lived and worked with, and from observation of the collective psychological processes of history.

As a possible starting point, as we enter into this archetypal psychological investigation, we probably need to start with a general observation that Carl Jung made, and acknowledge that the culture of India and the East is more ‘introverted’, and that of the West is more ‘extraverted’. Introverted and extraverted are difficult and paradoxical psychological concepts but they are very important and useful. In this context, cultural introversion is probably best understood through its manifestation in India’s vast diversity of religious understandings and devotional-receptive ‘other-power’ religious practices, and in Indian spirituality’s approach to meditation practice – which is generally explicitly devotional-receptive. The cultural extroversion of the West, finds expression in a ‘self-power’ emphasis in religious practice, and leads to a very different religious sensibility – one that is more externally-focused and behavioural, and where, at worst, a single interpretation of the truth was ruthlessly enforced through torture, persecution and war (as in Christianity).  To fully understand Buddhism and adapt it to Western psychology, we need to engage with the rich and polytheistic world out of which it arose, and we especially need to understand the ‘other-power’ nature of ancient (and contemporary) Indian culture, and its collectively introverted orientation.

To this day, there is a valued and widely understood social role in India for the shrāmana, the ‘holy man’, and the guru. These infinitely various representatives of the extraordinary multiplicity of Indian religion are variously tolerated, or followed by millions with intense devotion. Their are whole hereditary castes and sub-castes within Indian society ancient whose lives are devoted to maintaining ancient temples and ancient traditions of worship and meditation, all serving to profoundly affirm the diverse and richly imagined inner world of the Indian gods. The paradox of all this introversion is that it means that the polytheism of Indian religious culture is, most definitely, an ‘other-power’ form of spirituality. In India, the power of the ‘divine other’, however that may be conceived, is tangible. Many Westerners are shocked and fascinated by this – they describe being able to feel the reversal in the collective psychological culture as soon as they get off the plane when they visit India. They even report that they can feel the spiritual power of ‘Mother India’ – not only more introverted, but more feminine, and more maternal. Life in India seems chaotic and uncontrolled, but is felt to be more unconditionally affirming – as if there is a transcendent reality in which all the suffering of life is held and made meaningful.

The Buddha, like enumerable others of his time and since, left his home and family and became a shrāmana – a celibate holy man living on alms. His passionate wish for a life of engagement with the ‘inner’ through spiritual practice was something that ancient Indian society readily understood and affirmed. It is worth taking a minute to reflect on the person he was at that time. He was born into a wealthy warrior caste family, who owned land, so he wanted for nothing in his childhood. Indeed, his parents who had been told by an astrologer that he was destined to become a great spiritual practitioner and sage, had intentionally set out to overwhelm him with comforts and sensual distractions throughout his childhood and youth, so that he might be deflected from his destiny. So, the Buddha, at the time of his ‘Going Forth’ into the shrāmana life, had vigorous good health (he was almost certainly an accomplished practitioner of the ancient Indian martial arts) and the will-power and endurance of a warrior, but also a personal temperament that was introverted – a temperament that, in the context of Indian culture, meant that he was destined for a life of meditation and self-enquiry.

As I outlined in my last chapter, what the Buddha discovered in the course of the process of his Enlightenment was a Middle Way. One way we can think of this, is as a reconciliation of two archetypal principles that were playing out in him – the heroic and worldly ‘self-power’ principle of his warrior ancestors, and the ‘other-power’ principle that was drawing him to a surrender to the transcendental dharmakāya and to his deeper true nature. What the Buddha created out of that integration, was an entirely new religious sensibility – one that, while it emerged out of Indian spirituality, was qualitatively different and universal. What he created in the course of his life, was a universal spirituality that has a place in both East and West. The adaptation of Buddhism to Western culture however, requires sensitivity to the differences in the collective unconscious of those two domains – and a recognition that the East is introverted and polytheistic, while the West is extraverted and monotheistic.

A very significant feature of the inner cultural landscape, or collective unconscious (to use Carl Jung’s term for this essential concept) of the Indian subcontinent, both in the Buddha’s time and to this day, was the Mahabharat. The ancient Indian imagination recognised the archetypal reality of an eternal war between the devas and the asuras. While the realms of the devas may or may not be an objective cosmic reality, this multi-layered pantheon of gods certainly exist as archetypes within the polytheistic and imaginal world of the Indian subcontinent. They live in refined and blissful non-material levels of form – states of being that the devas have achieved through previous lifetimes of meditation (samādhi) and through devotional practices that have a distinctively ‘other-power’ focus.

The eternal opponents of the devas, in the Indian imagination, are the asuras. The nature of these beings contrasts in every way with the way of being of the devas. They are gross, harsh, violent, envious and extraverted – and completely focused on the accumulation of personal power, control and wealth. Importantly, in the light of our reflection on the differences in the collective unconscious of East and West, we find in the asura, an archetypal image of self-power – of the egoic will. It is culturally very significant that the asuras – these embodiments of self-power and of the egoic will – are in effect presented as personifications of evil, and as direct opposites to the benign character of the devas. It would not be putting it too strongly to say that in the dichotomy of the devas and the asuras, we see an ancient Indian representation of the dichotomy of love and power, or even of good and evil.

 

 

I shall have more to say about the asuras. The main thing I need to say at this stage is that this dichotomy of love and power is not so clear in the Western imagination. Indeed significantly, the West fails to recognise the extent to which they are absolute opposites. Most notably, and disturbingly, we often see in Western culture, imagery of the warrior hero as the archetype of the good – the moral will. When we compare the archetypal imagery of the warrior hero in Western mythology to that of the warrior hero in ancient India, we become keenly aware of what might be characterised as a strange and dangerous over-simplification and a cultural confusion on the Western side – and a general failure to recognise the dark side of the Hero archetype. It is as if, in the West, we are convinced that power can serve love – not realising how very easily this belief creates a one-sided approach to culture. So, as Western Buddhist practitioners there is always a tendency for us to neglect the ‘other-power’ dimension of spiritual practice, and we fail to reflect the balance of the Buddha’s Middle Way.

If we are seeking to understand the Western collective unconscious it is helpful to think of Jesus Christ as a mythic figure – or at least as a historical figure who lived a mythic life. Like the Buddha, he was a man who was drawn to the inner world and to an engagement with the absolute – with that level of mind that Buddhism came to call the dharmakāya. As we all know, he was a Jewish man who lived in ancient Palestine at a time when it was under oppressive Roman rule. Many of his group and tradition wanted him to use his charisma and spiritual power to become a heroic leader in the Jewish fight against the Romans. He refused this heroic path, recognising that he had something much more universal and important to say – a spiritual and mystical message for all races, not just for the Jewish people.

As we know, Jesus was crucified by the Romans after being rejected by his community – only a handful of his close companions stayed loyal to him. If we are seeking to understand the Western collective unconscious, it is helpful to understand Jesus Christ’s crucifixion as expressing a universal social dynamic that is particularly strong in the West’s collective psychology. Perhaps Christ’s greatest gift was his exemplification of an archetypal dynamic in which there is a collective rejection of a more realised and conscious individual who stands against the group – an individual who stood for spiritual values rather than material ones, and stood for nonviolence rather than war. It is significant that Jesus, given the extraverted and monotheistic tradition of Judaism, was rejected and crucified, whereas the Buddha was welcomed and naturally found a place in the more diverse, tolerant, and introverted spiritual culture of ancient India – even though the Buddha’s message was also very challenging to his society.

The archetypal significance of the figure of Christ is rarely understood in this way – indeed, as most of us know, his message is very often completely subverted – and even reversed. It is as if, in the context of the Western collective unconscious, his message, though much needed, is especially hard for us to hear. In the West we prefer extraverted warrior heroes, and Jesus was rejecting that role, and offering something very subtle indeed. His message of compassion and forgiveness, and his vision of a way of being that is a surrender, even to the point of recognising the source of our being and our identity in the divine reality – in the divine ground of our being (the dharmakāya of Buddhist tradition) – has parallels with the teachings of the Buddha. We find the same emphasis on forgiveness, or primordial guiltlessness, in Buddhist wisdom, where it is framed in terms of the idea of ’emptiness’ of self-nature (shunyatā). In the Western context, the Buddha’s message is just as likely to be subverted as Christ’s was – the dominant archetypes in the Western collective unconscious, will almost guarantee it.

What is striking, in the context of this comparison of East and West is that there was a seeming reversal, due to the particular history of Christianity, in which the emphasis in Christ’s teachings was adapted to the political needs of the Roman Empire, so that Christianity became predominantly extraverted and heroic. Indeed, Christianity took on the archetypal culture and character of the Roman Empire – with its drive for domination and centralised power. It also took on a version of the monotheistic intolerance of other races and religions that had characterised Judaism, and proceeded to crush the Pagan religious cultures and to crush dissenting voices within it own ranks, with an astonishing and deeply incongruous cruelty – given its founder’s message of tolerance and compassion. All this violence was justified by a rhetorical narrative that framed the process in terms of the fight of good against evil – the extraverted heroic fight that Jesus had rejected.

Because it is so much part of our collective psychological inheritance, Westerners need to acknowledge the unfortunate way in which Judaic monotheism, which at the time of Jesus was so foreign to the polytheistic religious sensibilities of the Romans, was adopted as the religion of the late Roman empire precisely because its single divine ‘absolute ruler’ served as such an ideal divine pattern on which to base an empire. The heroic temperament of the Romans was drawn to Judeo-Christian monotheism – and then that monotheism, once it was established in the religious sensibility of the Roman empire, in turn shaped the Western mind. It was as if Judaic monotheism gave Rome’s Western ideal of the warrior hero an extra dimension of absoluteness – together with an extra degree of judgemental harshness and a blind drive for domination.

In the process by which Christianity shaped the collective unconscious of the West, Yahweh became a projection of the Western heroic ego and the Western heroic ego took on the absolute punishing authority of Yahweh – so the actual culture of Christianity was profoundly incongruous with the gentle and compassionate figure of Jesus at its centre. As Western Buddhists we need to keenly aware of these collective psychological forces. To the extent that we are unaware of them, we will find ourselves embodying a distinctive Western egoic style that is heroic and monotheistic. We may even find some of the negative characteristics of Christianity informing our practice of Buddhism.

There is so much that could be said about this. This is not just the history of the Christian Church – it is the establishment and consolidation, in the collective unconscious of the West, of a deep psychological Shadow and societal dysfunction. While Christianity remains an intolerant, belligerent, and imperialist cultural force, its dominant place, and its ability to shape the moral order has been largely taken over by a liberal humanism – a world-view that, for the most part, is just as wedded to a black-and-white absolutism, and to the good-and-evil thinking of the heroic perspective. The same stark incongruity that we saw in Christianity between an egoic persona-identity of compassion and the unconscious reality of brutal power is now playing out in the US-led liberal world order.

Almost every Western politician and journalist that I see on my television screen seems locked into the cognitive-perceptual blindness of this Western egoic archetype. I find myself horrified to notice that all historical context, balance, and nuance is removed from their analysis – there is no capacity to step back out of the egoic viewpoint and into a place of objectivity. Instead, we get ignorant one-sided, judgemental narratives of good and evil. Sometimes we can see that these commentators are just being dishonest and playing their propaganda role, but more often they seem lost in unconscious identification with the cultural narrative that they are presenting. Immersed in the archetypal pattern of the heroic fight, they cannot help but project the Shadow.

It seems to be of the nature of the egoic mind to frame everything in heroic terms, and, even in the context of a Buddhist Sangha, to defend against the challenging reality of the transcendental – against that objective dharmic dimension from which real objectivity and true discernment are possible. This is extremely paradoxical – and quite astonishing and disturbing to see. While Jesus attempted to offer a path away from the heroic, it is probably fair to say that, in general terms, he was very unsuccessful – although clearly, there have been countless individual practitioners and communities within the Christian tradition that stayed much closer to his teachings. I shall be reflecting on some of these later. The Buddha’s message was better received. Although Buddhism died out in India after the Moslem invasions in the second half of the first millennium, it continued to flourish in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Far East, especially in those Far Eastern countries where it adopted an ‘other-power’ orientated cultural form, and achieved a practical and philosophical reconciliation of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’.

The point I want to emphasise here is that those who wish to promote Buddhism in the West need to be sure that their mission is not informed by the same archetypal forces within the collective unconscious of the West that caused Christianity to betray its founder’s message. Reflecting on this diversity of Buddhist culture across the East and down through history, it is not unreasonable to make the observation that the more complete was this practical and philosophical reconciliation of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’, the more vital and successful was that strand of Buddhist tradition. I believe that this cultural reconciliation creates the conditions for an even more subtle reconciliation – the ‘self-discovery’ perspective that I have been calling Vajrayāna. While this sort of cultural reconciliation is seen across the Buddhist East, it is probably fair to say that the most striking examples of it are in the Vajrayāna Buddhism of the Himalayan countries, but it is also seen in some approaches to Zen practice, and in aspects of the Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land School) of Japan. While there is value in all these approaches, I shall be drawing most heavily on Tibetan Buddhism.

The crucifixion of Jesus was a particular instance of a broader archetypal dynamic in the collective unconscious that we can speak of in terms of the Scapegoat archetype. The Torah describes the original Scapegoating process – the ritual in which a Jewish priest symbolically lays the sins of the Jewish tribe upon a goat before casting the animal into the wilderness to die, or pushing it off a cliff to its death. It can be argued that this was the origin of the ‘Jesus died for our sins’ motif. So, the Scapegoat archetype is something that found a rather dark expression in the covenant relationship of the Jewish people with their god, and which now continues to be played out unconsciously every day in Western culture. There are obvious implications, and comments that could be made about how such ideas undermine the practice of ethics within both Jewish and Christian culture, but my focus here is on the archetypal psychological dynamic of which the scapegoat ritual and the crucifixion of Jesus were examples. Our ability to see scapegoating and Shadow projection at work in ourselves and our societies, and our willingness to own our own darkness rather than projecting it out, is fundamental to our practice of ethics. Ideals and personal will are not enough. Without a willingness to recognise these dynamics, we will, quite simply, be incapable of acting ethically.

It is a sad paradox that the West, whose dominant religion is Christianity, and whose founder was a scapegoat figure, now continues to indulge every day in ignorant scapegoating narratives. I have a non-rational love of the figure of Jesus that surprises me from time to time, and I have Christian friends who I love and respect – and several of the historical figures who have been sources of guidance and inspiration for me, were Christians. I believe however, that it is important for Western Buddhists, without devaluing or dismissing Christian faith, to reflect deeply on the incongruous nature of Christianity – both as a cultural and historical process, and as a set of psychological predispositions in the collective unconscious of the Western psyche. Those archetypal patterns in the collective unconscious that we do not recognise and understand, are the patterns that we are likely to find ourselves repeating unconsciously.

It can be argued that there is a paradoxical sense in which Buddhists need to listen to the essence of what Jesus was saying, because it speaks to the particular condition of the Western mind. We must, I believe, reject the egoic mind’s pull to the extraverted surface and to the heroic, and must seek to recognise the source of our identity in the eternal and absolute. The general refusal, or inability, of the West to hear the message of Jesus, and the egoic distortion we bring to that message, should be taken as a warning by Buddhists. We must also resist the closely-related pull of the Scapegoat archetype – becoming aware of our Shadow and our egoic predisposition to project it onto others. The ignorant heroic spirit of Western culture cannot be incorporated into the culture of a Western Buddhism without significant danger. We must find a place, despite our Western scientific materialism, for a true ‘other-power’ Buddhism in the West, and for a Buddhist culture that values the introverted practice of self-enquiry, or ‘self-discovery’ – the practice of looking beyond the egoic mind for the source of our being, our identity, and out ethical sensibility. This, for me, is the Middle Way.

The West’s devotion to various expressions of the Warrior Hero archetype began in the Pagan period when the first European and Middle Eastern civilisations were emerging. The actual cultural institutions that grew out of the religion founded by the followers of Jesus of Nazareth – ‘Jesus, the Forgiver of Sins’ (to use William Blake’s wonderful phrase) – continued to give expression to this heroic spirit, while at the same time reacting harshly against the earth-god and feminine aspects of the previous spiritual culture of Paganism. The polytheistic traditions of Paganism revered personifications of the archetypal forces that animate Nature, human life, and relationships. By contrast, Christianity’s tendency has been towards a devaluation, subjugation and appropriation of the material, the natural, and the feminine – both in our environment and in human nature – and it is still shaping our world. Paradoxically, these tendencies continue to profoundly shape Western culture, not only our faith, but our atheism also – not only our irrational religious conservatism, but our secular democratic liberalism as well. We are still finding enemies to project our devils onto and still finding heretics to persecute. The chosen scapegoats may change, but the depth of the spiritual ignorance and the violence of the defensive psychological dynamics remains the same.

In his lifetime, Carl Jung witnessed a dramatic and difficult period of history – many decades of rampaging cruelty and psychological darkness – with the rise of fascism and totalitarian Communism, and two horrible world wars, in nominally Christian Europe and across the globe. I see him as having spent his life calling the people of the West to the same wide-awake ethical vigilance that the Buddha advocated. This was the same cautious, vigilant, watchfulness for the ever-present Shadow that was integral to the Buddha’s practice of Mindfulness. In recent times, only the great French philosopher, Rene Girard, has come anywhere near Carl Jung and the Buddha, in his depth of his engagement with the world-shaping, and potentially world-destroying reality of psychological Shadow. I regard it as something of a failure on the part of Western Buddhism that it has not been able to do more to contribute to a collective awareness of this archetypal dynamic.

So, an especially prominent and especially unconscious factor in Western culture is the Warrior Hero archetype. We need to face into the fact that the mythic heroes who were the psychological founders of the Western cultural strands that found expression in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome, were masters of war – experts in destruction, killing, conquest, domination and enslavement. The imagery and spirit of this archetype is irrationally compelling for us in the West, and is so deeply and unconsciously part of the mind of the Western practitioner that it seems that we cannot help but project it onto our understanding of Buddhism. Unless we are aware of this mythic background, we may even turn Dharma practice into a brutal and muscular conquest of psychological enemies within ourselves – especially a fight with the supposed enemy of our instincts for erotic bondedness and sexual intimacy.

At worst, the Dharma may even be taken over, in the Western context, by what Jung would call the psychology of the ‘positive-mother-complex’ – a precocious engagement with the cultural gifts of the heroic, while being subject simultaneously to dark fears that these gifts will be lost to the devouring Mother archetype of family and sexuality, with her attendant preoccupations of material security and comfort. The positive side of the Mother archetype blesses her sons with confidence and capability, but the Negative Mother lingers in the unconscious, poisoning their minds with irrational fears. Locked into a defensive relationship with their authentic depth, those apparently blessed individuals who become a ‘hero-of-the-mother’, are just as doomed as all material heroes are. In fact their fate may be worse. They sit forever in the lap of the Mother archetype – mostly unaware of her presence, even as they accuse others of being in her thrall. While sometimes appearing to challenge her, they are often actually agents and advocates for a world-view in which Mother Nature – and not the transcendental – is front and centre. When we examine their behaviour closely, we recognise that, consciously or unconsciously, they are champions of the personal will and of the scientific materialist worldview.

If we make the nirmānakāya the context for our worldview and our practice, rather than the dharmic order, then we are likely to end up advocating for a narrowly heroic and idealistic form of Buddhist spirituality, that while it may be aspirational and culturally rich, tends to be elitist – and unable to offer comfort to those who are struggling. There is a great danger that we then end up with an exclusive spirituality that is tailored for ‘strong ego’ individuals and has nothing to offer the traumatised – even though the traumatised will be drawn to the rhetoric and imagery of wisdom and compassion. When we begin to recognise that the heroic will and the egoic will are the same, and begin to recognise how limited the ‘self-power’ perspective is, we naturally want to move beyond mere ‘self-development’.

If we look carefully at the archetypal psychology of the Hero, we realise that, while such a spirituality can be made to look very sophisticated, a Buddhism created by and for such heroes, will be a dumbed-down spirituality. The brute Heracles, with a crude club as his chosen weapon, provides us with one of the quintessential images of the Western hero. He strangles the invulnerable Nemean lion with his bear hands and then takes its invulnerability upon himself by wearing its skin. This wearing of the skin of the Nemean lion is a profound and multi-dimensional symbol. The Hero values the invulnerability of the animal skin – the skin that could not be pierced by any weapon – and he also values the animal’s energy that it represents. He seeks to take on these two qualities and to embody them both. So, the animal skin of invulnerability symbolises both the tight psychological defences of the egoic mind, and the animal vitality of our instinctual energy – the life-force of Mother Nature. So, the hero’s strength and will-power comes from his animal vitality, not from the dharmic level of mind. The heroic individual may be physically strong and self-assured, and maintains a certain power and charisma on the level of the personality, but he is often hardened, brutal, and intellectually one-dimensional – and far from wise. It is the bodhisattva that we must keep in mind – not the Western warrior hero.

As an aside, it does, of course, need to be acknowledged that men need archetypal images of the masculine to guide their aspiration and their development – and Buddhism, if it is wise, can respond to this in a way that offers archetypal images of the masculine that take us very much deeper than the Hero, which already dominates our culture anyway. In the imagery of the five archetypal Buddhas, and that of other archetypal figures like the bodhisattva, Buddhism provides a whole pantheon of inspiring male figures. These Buddhas embody a great depth of wisdom and energy – each one represents an aspect of the Middle Way path and of the dharmic reality. In a later chapter, I shall be outlining the profound aspects of the masculine that are embodied in each of these figures – dimensions of the masculine that go far beyond the merely heroic. Along with each of these, I shall be describing the corresponding female Buddhas, who we really need to think of as inseparable from their male partners – as if the pairs of figures represent two sides of the same experience; two sides of the same spiritual principle.

I find it significant that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, heir to Buddhism’s long history of monasticism, chose at some point, early in the last millennium of its history, to start depicting the essential qualities of Enlightenment in five male archetypal Buddha ‘couples’. Our assumption that Buddhas are solitary and ascetic figures is challenged when we see them represented iconographically as resting in sexual union with a female Buddha partner. In the course of their emergence within Buddhism in the previous millennium, the five male Buddhas were often called the Jinas – the ‘Conquerors’ – and they were indeed figures of great importance in the historical expansion of Buddhism. The emergence within the tradition of this imagery of Buddha ‘couples’ therefore certainly serves to counter the earlier association with the heroic and solitary – making the relational nature of these Buddhas very explicit indeed.

We might imagine that the Hero represents courageous individuality in the face of group pressure – a quality that was powerfully embodied in both the Buddha and Jesus. Unfortunately however, the hero image in Western culture more often ennobles a surrender of individuality. The most obvious example of this is the heroic soldier, who willingly immerses himself in the tribal consciousness of his regiment and his nation – and willingly follows the orders of his commanders, even when death is much more likely than glory. This aspect of the heroic is disastrous for a Sangha, which, in my view, can only function and serve its community of students if each of its members is committed to an authentic individuality and an ethic of personal responsibility that is rooted in an aspiration to a level of spiritual practice that has gone beyond the heroic – and to go beyond the heroic we must enter the domain of ‘other-power’, the ‘self-surrender’ approach to practice.

It is one of the difficult, and poorly understood paradoxes of the Hero archetype, that it undermines individuality. This is because the Hero is not only the archetype of individual identity and individual will – it is the archetype of group identity and group will also. The egoic mind is a group phenomenon. The Hero then, far from being the archetype of the individual, is the archetype of the group leader and group member. Identification with the Hero archetype will almost always cause us to instinctively ‘close ranks’ and defend the social identity of our group or nation. Indeed ‘closing ranks’, a military metaphor, eloquently describes one of the distinctive social dynamics of the group – the need to consolidate the group narrative, when it is challenged by reality. The result of this in history, is that the population of a nation state can easily be mobilised for war. It may seem hard to believe, but the same surrender of individuality will show itself in the culture of a Sangha, if the archetype of the Hero is established in the group mind.

In my view, there is nothing more undermining to individuality, and nothing is more potentially disintegrating both on the individual psychological level and the social psychological level, than an unconscious adoption of the values of heroic surrender in which we place the shared conviction of our group, or the conviction of the leaders of our group, over our own knowing. In the Sangha context, we may imagine that this sort of heroic surrender of personal volition and discernment will sweep away the egoic mind itself, but it will usually do the opposite – it will create internal conflict and depression, and it will damage relationships within the Sangha. Whatever superficial and temporary collective social cohesion is achieved by such heroic surrender of our knowing, to those of higher rank and experience in a spiritual organisation, this sort of behaviour or cultural expectation will ultimately only undermine the creation of true spiritual community – true Sangha.

I am aware that this as a bold and paradoxical assertion. It is common for people to assume that the capacity to take individual responsibility is an essential feature of the heroic, but this is unfortunately not the case. Even if individuality and personal ethical responsibility are adopted within the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective as ideals, this is absolutely no guarantee that these qualities will be manifest. Intention and will-power, even if these are present, are not enough. Individuality and personal ethical responsibility spring from profound and multi-dimensional self-awareness and from the meditative embodiment process that the Buddha described as a Middle Way. Such self-awareness and embodiment requires a true ‘self-surrender’ (in the sense of real recognition of, and surrender to the ‘other power’ of the dharmic reality), and ‘self-discovery’ (forms of practice in which self-power and ‘other-power’ are balanced and reconciled, and in which the egoic will no longer takes centre stage).

Various disparaging comments are sometimes made against the ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’ perspectives by advocates of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. One of these is that those who go beyond the heroic ‘self-development’ stage, ‘do not need the Sangha’. While it is true that in the deeper stages of practice, we find, in a sense, sources of guidance within, I do not believe that it necessarily follows that we then no longer need the Sangha. I would certainly acknowledge however, that our relationship to Sangha changes, and that the Sangha aspect of our ‘Going For Refuge’ matures into a deeper solidarity and a deeper desire to collaborate with our peers in the work of teaching the Dharma and creating Sangha. Ultimately, a Sangha is a spiritual community in which each participant is functioning as an individual – manifesting an individuality that is rooted in a keen sense of the dharmic reality, and showing the high level of discriminating discernment and objective knowing, that springs from that. It could be argued therefore, that an effective Sangha must have a critical mass of practitioners who are practicing either out of the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ perspective, or at least out of a deep and true experience of the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality.

There are very deep questions to be addressed in regard to the way in which the culture of the Sangha serves to support the spiritual development of its members, and we get different answers to these questions depending on which of the ‘myths’ we are viewing the Dharma from. An exhaustive exploration of these questions would be enough material for a whole separate book. While I do not want to give too much time to this, it needs to be acknowledged that there is an assumption, even among advocates of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, that we cannot sustain the heroic approach to the Dharma without the external support of other similarly-engaged Sangha members. This is a logical assumption. Indeed, it would seem that it is only as we grow into an ‘other-power’ perspective, and into the three-fold perspective that I have been calling Vajrayāna, that we develop true spiritual autonomy. When we see spiritual development as primarily taking place through the action of the heroic moral will of the ‘self-development’ perspective, we are also acknowledging that, at that stage, our Buddhist identity and our ethics are primarily socially constructed, and at least partly dependent on our relationship with the Sangha.

An extreme version of this view, holds that the novice not only needs the Sangha, but should be willing to surrender every aspect of their egoic identity, and should allow a new self to be curated by the influence of their spiritual superiors within the Sangha. While such an attitude expresses a heroic willingness to surrender the egoic mind, and a heroic commitment to self-transcendence, it is far from wise – indeed it is very likely to be either psychologically harmful, or at the very least completely unsustainable. This view also reveals the psychological shallowness of the heroic perspective, and shows a very disturbing, almost delusional ignorance regarding the nature of the self – a confusion that Buddhists who are advocates of the ‘self-development’ perspective are unfortunately very prone to. While the Buddha did indeed tell us that the self is a systemic phenomena made up of five component cognitive-perceptual processes (skandhas) that are each ’empty’ of self-nature, he would not deny the particularity of each apparent individual’s process, or of each individual’s particular gift. The ’emptiness’ of the skandhas does not imply any denial of the apparent individual’s value or humanity, or of the reality of the human needs that arise in the process of the unfoldment of their unique potential.

The tendency to advocate for this sort of curation, or self-curation of the self is very common in Buddhist cultural settings, both in the East and in the West. There are formulations in the Pali Canon that, when read superficially, appear to support this view, as does a superficial reading of the anatman (no-self) doctrine. Because it appears to have a traditional basis, it is very easy for a Western Sangha to fall into a cultural pattern of affirming this sort of dangerous and delusional thinking. The lack of thought given to the psychological implications of this view, is for me a classic example of how the partial psychological view that is the archetypal perspective of the heroic, can seize the mind and plunge a person into unconsciousness, erasing intellectual discernment and true individuality. There is clearly a dark Shadow to this impulse towards heroic ‘self-transcendence’ through a curated or self-curated self. There are parallels in the social psychology of totalitarianism that the world witnessed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism – societies which embraced an ideal of heroic ‘self-transcendence’ through service to an all-powerful state. While drawing parallels such as these may at first seem alarmist, Subhuti’s archetypal perspective leads us to make these connections – and highlights the great importance of bringing awareness to the problematic nature of the heroic, if we wish to create real Sangha, and protect the reputation of the Dharma.

Those who would create Sangha, need to be keenly aware of these dangers and of the need for a critical perspective on these Shadow aspects of the ‘self-development’ myth. Because this perspective appears to justify attitudes of what we might call ‘positive social control’ by senior practitioners within the Sangha, it needs to be approached with very great care and ethical vigilance. I have seen this sort of collective psychology of positive social control get out of hand. Basic social ethics can so easily be lost sight of in the apparent camaraderie of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. At worst, the manipulation of individuals ‘for their own good’ becomes part of Sangha culture and even perhaps implicitly part of the ‘compassionate’ activity of the practitioner who has embraced the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective.

When we see the darkness of this Shadow, we have a clearer understanding of why the Buddhist tradition evolved the balanced and three-fold view that I have been talking about. The historical flowering and predominance of an ‘other-power Buddhism’ – often simply called ‘Pure Land’ Buddhism – across the Far East, is evidence of a balancing movement within the tradition that countered the heroic emphasis that continued in the Theravada. When reading the Pali Canon, we should always remember that the Theravada is only one the eighteen schools of Early Buddhism. Because the Theravada was established in Sri Lanka, it was the only school that survived the horrific book-burning process that accompanied the Moslem invasions. The ‘Other-power’ Buddhism that flourished in east Asia, can be seen as a movement towards equilibrium within Sangha culture, and within the tradition. This is especially exemplified by the True Pure Land schools (Jodo Shunshu), which created Buddhist cultures that express a profound humility and solidarity – and have something for everyone, not just the heroic and intellectual elite. ‘Other-power’ Buddhism involves a recognition that our salvation is not achieved solely by our personal will, but by devotional receptivity (‘self-surrender’) to the soteriological (salvation) force of an objective and benevolent dharmic reality.

There is a tendency for Western Buddhists of the heroic ‘self-development’ persuasion, to see the self a some sort of tabula rasa (blank slate) – a dangerous delusion, in my view. There is however, a balancing counter-point to this that had become well-established in Buddhist tradition by the time it reached its Vajrayāna phase. I am thinking of the tathāgatagarba teaching – the teaching that we know in English as the ‘Buddha Nature’ teaching. Tathāgatagarba literally means Buddha ’embryo’ or Buddha ‘womb’ – so it has the associations of vulnerability and fragility, and the need for an attitude of protection and the nurture of something delicate and precious beyond measure. This imagery is particularly striking, given that the same objective dharmic reality is elsewhere characterised as like the mythic un-breakable diamond thunderbolt, or vajra. But it is our connection with this reality that is subtle and tentative, and fragile like a growing shoot – not the dharmic reality itself.

So, the ‘Buddha Nature’ idea, is the idea that one of the goals of our practice should be to directly approach, and attempt to familiarise ourselves with, the eternal and primordially pure dharmakāya, and glimpse its reflection in the sambhogakāya. When we recognise that the primordial purity and love of these dharmic levels of mind, are always there, whatever the surface of the mind is doing, it brings a deeper and gentler approach to practice; and a more ‘self-discovery’-focused perspective on the Dharma and the culture of the Sangha. So, the tathāgatagarba teaching, implies an openness to real relationship with the dharmic ‘other-power’, and together these teachings bring powerful and necessary understandings – important contradictions to the problems associated with the heroic.

It needs to be acknowledged that the heroic ‘self-development’ approach, when it dominates our view of the Dharma and is practiced in isolation, is grandiose in its claims and aspirations, and can inadvertently set Sangha members up for almost guaranteed failure. This is not just my experience – the Buddha and numerous Buddhist sages down through the centuries have said the same. The egoic will may bring success for a while. It may succeed in achieving our goals, in managing our suffering for a while – by skilfully modifying the conditions that are creating it. It may succeed in finding a succession of positive experiences and material things that compensate for our suffering – but ultimately it always fails, if only in the inevitability of old age, disease, and death.

Such is the essential hubris of the one-sidedly heroic ‘self-development’ view, that I find myself of the opinion that it is only by fully integrating an ‘other-power’ perspective into our approach to practice that we can avoid either a sense of failure, or a delusional sense of personal success. The heroic perspective is such that if it is approached exclusively and one-sidedly, it will reverse. If this reversal is not approached consciously, as an embrace of ‘other-power’, then the reversal will be in the form of a sense of failure – and collapse of the practitioner’s heroic identity and a painful sense of disillusionment. This dynamic of the necessary and inevitable emergence of a balancing opposite can be seen everywhere in the natural world and in human psychology. Many of the great philosophers spoke of it – Heraclitus, Plato and Nietzsche among them.

So, when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life, it will inevitably eventually manifest its opposite in some way. Clearly this a key idea for Western Buddhists who want to understand the processes by of integration and of the transformation of our emotional and volitional life – and it is clearly foundational for our understanding of the nature of the Buddha’s Middle Way. Jung found this inherent tendency of the mind to try to return to equilibrium to be so fundamental that he invented a term for it – enantiodromia. Our task as Buddhists and practitioners of the Middle Way, is to understand and anticipate the way the open system of the mind is always seeking to restore balance – and is ultimately seeking to rest in an equilibrium in which the egoic identity is released and we come to rest in the ultimate equilibrium of a relationship with, and non-separateness from, the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya.

If we fail to consciously embrace a real sense of ‘other-power’ and fail to find a real sense of faith and trust based on an experiential recognition of the dharmic reality, then psychological ‘resistance’ to the heroic position will build up to the point where it quite simply prevents us from operating heroically any longer – the reaction that has been building up in the unconscious will break through the sense of conscious control that we have established using the ‘self-development’ frame of reference. So, the fundamental paradox of the heroic ‘self-development’ view is that it quite simply cannot succeed if practiced in isolation. We must expand our vision of what the Dharma life is, and must find the Middle Way, and a place for an ‘other-power’ perspective within our practice, or failure and disillusionment is guaranteed. It is only through our integration of the ‘other-power’ perspective that the heroic can be sustained. The ideal of the Buddhist Hero must be replaced, first perhaps by the ideal of the bodhisattva, but subsequently by an experiential recognition of the reality of the bodhisattva, as the essence of the dharmic reality in which we rest.

An embrace of the ‘other-power’ perspective is sometimes framed as an acceptance of inevitability of the failure of ‘self-power’ practice – and it does indeed sometimes arise out of a crisis of faith in ‘self-power’ practice. I myself have had visionary experiences that arose at such times of crisis. This somewhat negative framing of ‘self-power’ practice as arising out of a failure of, or disillusionment with, ‘self-power’, while it is understandable, is not necessary – because the embrace of the ‘self-power’ can equally be viewed as natural evolution out of ‘self-power’ practice and as form of empowerment. This is the perspective that I shall be presenting in my approach to Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ in this book. I shall be attempting to offer an explanation of how the approach which I have been calling the three-fold perspective of the Vajrayāna, can naturally unfold if we follow Sangharakshita’s four stages.

While I love the humility of the perspective on ‘other-power’ practice that we find in Pure Land Buddhism (especially as it is presented by Shinran) it is the ‘other-power’ perspective of the Vajrayāna that Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model appears to lead us to. Key to this third, or three-fold, perspective is the practical emphasis on shunyatā, or ’emptiness’. The recognition that both the structure of egoic ‘self-system’ and the archetypal reality of the dharmic dimension are ’empty’ of self-nature, allows us to enter into a relationship between these two things in a way that recognises their ultimate unity – or at least entertains that possibility. I do not want to disparage the approach of Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu) – far from it. Indeed, I see Jodo Shinshu as having evolved, by a different route, a version of the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ perspective that I have been calling Vajrayāna.

The heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, quite apart from tending to lead to crudely hierarchical forms of governance, has an inherent tendency to arrange the Sangha into a hierarchy of success and failure. While some Buddhists may be able to comfort themselves with the idea that there will be future lives, this is a very limited consolation. While dogged tenacity, persistence and endurance are aspects of the Buddhist virtue of determination, or virya, we need to be sure that we are not narrowing our spiritual frame of reference in adopting such an attitude as our guiding principle. One of the paradoxes of the heroic view is that it speaks much too easily, in my view, about this idea of practicing in future lives over aeons of time, and is remarkably closed to the idea of gaining Enlightenment in this lifetime – or learning to rest, as the deeply-conditioned, un-perfected, un-Enlightened beings that we are, in the benevolent grace of the ever-present dharmic reality.

In his Five Spiritual Faculties teaching (the five indriyas), the Buddha presented a balancing factor to the ‘self-power’ of virya in the ‘other-power’ principle of samādhi – the meditative-receptivity and ‘self-surrender’ of meditation practice. Western practitioners tend to miss the fact of the Buddha’s framing of meditation as an ‘other-power’ practice in this way. Missing the Middle Way balance that the Buddha was seeking to communicate, we assume that meditation is simply a ‘self-power’ practice – solely an exercise of the moral will, and practiced in an existential vacuum. When, as Westerner meditation practitioners, we do at last open to ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality, our practice is transformed – and we discover, perhaps for the first time, what the Buddha meant by samādhi.

The Mahayāna, the principle of virya (vigour, determination, ‘self-power’, personal will) is presented in a slightly different but closely related way – but again it is presented with a polar opposite, which challenges us to find a Middle Way balance and reconciliation. Here we find virya as one of the pairs in the Six (or Eight) Perfections of the bodhisattva, balanced by the equally important ‘other-power’ principle of kshanti. Many readers will be familiar with the Sanskrit word, shanti, which means ‘peace’. Kshanti has this association, and is usually translated as ‘patience’. While virya relentlessly exerts energy ‘in pursuit of the good’, kshanti is acceptance, allowing what is, and the serenity of acknowledging our limitations. It would be a mistake to see kshanti as any sort of passivity however. When we recognise kshanti as an expression, like samādhi, of the ‘other-power’ attitude, we gain a better sense of what sort of patience and acceptance kshanti is referring to. Kshanti challenges the arrogance of our delusional Western belief that the egoic will can achieve anything, with an appropriate humility. We are being invited to rest and accept the support of the divine.

The spiritually sensitive individual who is drawn to Buddhism, is often someone who recognises, sometimes with a visceral sense of grief, the suffering of this world. This is the inherent unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha, that the Buddha spoke of in his first discourse, on the Four Noble Truths – a paradoxical teaching that invites us to hold the realities of dukkha and nirvāna simultaneously in awareness. The Buddha’s Middle Way offers a response to dukkha, that is much more than a path of relentless determination and heroic confrontation with the reality of that suffering in order to overcome it. I have come to believe that the Buddhist tradition developed a much better counter to our guaranteed suffering life after life, in the twin notions of ‘Buddha Nature’ and an ‘other-power’ relationship to the ever-present dharmic reality.

The Middle Way path of the bodhisattva, is very much more humble, gentle and tentative than the Western heroic mindset would have us believe – we can only really face our own suffering, and the suffering of this world, if we have the humility to accept support from the beneficent dharmic dimension. So, while virya is the impulse to assert a moral will, within the current cognitive-perceptual frame of reference of our conditioned and egoic nature; kshanti, is that opposite, but equally important and equally transformative ‘other-power’ attitude of acceptance and patience, that choses to rest as Consciousness – to rest receptively, guided by our growing confidence in the objective and eternally-present reality of nirvāna. We need to create and deepen a connection with the dharmic reality, and this requires, not the force of virya, but the gentleness and sensitivity of forms of self-enquiry that are guided by kshanti, and by an attunement to those subtle resonances of the dharmic reality that reach the threshold of egoic consciousness. Indeed, virya, appropriated by the heroic ego’s ‘self-development’ mindset, as it usually is, will entirely overlook the subtle manifestations of the dharmic reality, and is almost guaranteed to break the fragile connection. I shall be returning to outline what virya really is. I believe it is best described by the Tibetan Vajrayāna – where it is spoken of in terms of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

For me, the notions of an in-dwelling ‘Buddha Nature’, and of an objective and ever-present dharmic reality belong together. Although they are not usually paired in this way, they can be thought of as an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ framing of the same spiritual phenomenon. I have chosen to introduce these ideas via Buddhism’s three-level trikāya model of mind – a model which allows us to approach the transcendental either as a reality ‘out there’ or as, somehow, ‘in here’. When we acknowledge that we are inseparably connected to the samboghakāya and dharmakāya as objectively and collectively existing levels of the mind – that they are woven into the fabric of the ‘Vajra Space’ of Consciousness – then we usually find ourselves simultaneously open to some sense of what the ‘Buddha Nature’ teaching is pointing to.

This is paradoxical territory, and can be difficult for the heroic Western mind to fathom – especially if we are unconsciously wedded to a scientific materialism that implicitly precludes the existence of a transcendental reality. Within the exclusive ‘self-development’ perspective of ‘self-power’, the sambhogakāya is reduced to a set of personifications of the spiritual ego’s ideals – its objective archetypal reality, and its depth and complexity as a rich, impersonal description of the higher mind, is denied. Similarly, the dharmakāya is reduced to a distant goal that is beyond comprehension, rather than acknowledged as an ever-present reality. In my last chapter, I associated the dharmakāya with something undeniable and ever-present in our experience – the experience of Consciousness.

We can think of the dharmakāya as the field of proto-Consciousness that allows our apparently individual experience of Consciousness to arise. This arising of Consciousness is subject to the additional condition of a brain that can function as a receiver in relation to that proto-Consciousness – and therefore as a receiver, in every moment of Mindfulness, of that primordial intelligence. When we recognise the dharmakāya in this way – an also as something that is in the process of being validated by Quantum science – we rescue it from its conceptual obscurity, and entertain the possibility that it is the most fundamental aspect of our experience. Indeed, we may come to recognise that as everything in our cognitive-perceptual experience seems increasingly fleeting and unreliable, the only thing that is not subject to that radical impermanence, is Consciousness itself.

So, a much needed and comforting balance to the ‘self-development’ view, and to the misery of heroic persistence in the face of inevitable failure life after life, is to be found in the experiential recognition of the reality of archetypal sambhogakāya level of mind. The sambhogakāya provides us with glimpses, through visionary imagery and bodily-felt experience, of the nature of the eternal dharmakāya – which can only be known by its effects in our experience. It is through our devotional-receptive ‘self-surrender’ to the ‘other-power’ of these two levels of the dharmic reality, that we become able to find a patient acceptance, and full acknowledgement of the inherent helplessness and dysfunction of our conditioned nature. So, the ‘Buddha Nature’ teaching – which at first seems like such a grandiose and delusional idea for beings like ourselves who are caught in the conditioned web of the nirmānakāya – when properly understood, implies these characteristics of humility and vulnerability. For me, these characteristics of humility and vulnerability – the deep acceptance and full acknowledgement of our fallibility and human weakness – are the essential hallmarks of genuine practice within the ‘self-discovery’ perspective of the Vajrayāna.

The ‘self-discovery’ perspective invites us to look within for both comfort and self-empowerment from beyond the egoic mind, and provides a particular counterpoint to the sense of success and failure that are so deeply part of the ‘self-development’ view. It is a perspective which invites all Sangha members equally into the enquiry and into the collaboration. The logic of the ‘self-development’ perspective leads to a more external view of spiritual learning, and to the claim that we should just ‘be receptive’ to those who are higher in the spiritual hierarchy, and should simply revere those members who have more experience. While this guidance clearly has a place, it does have a Shadow side, which we must endeavour to make conscious. Those individuals who have gained positions of authority within our Sangha, and therefore have a role in the maintenance or repair of the reputation of a Sangha, should pay attention to this.

It is a paradoxical fact that ‘self-development’ can actually discourage critical thinking, creativity and initiative – and that it blocks the upward flow of feedback in the organisation that the senior members need in order to perform their leadership roles. It can even be argued that the heroic-hierarchical view devalues and discourages depth in peer-to-peer friendships. In the context of the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ perspective, peer-to-peer Dharmic friendships naturally tend to become profoundly healing self-enquiry dyads – mutual affirmations of our vulnerable openness to the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality; and the mutual investigations into the ’empty’ nature of mind. Paradoxically, this sort of depth of Dharmic connection, and Dharmic enquiry, can be threatening to the heroic-hierarchical view which sees wisdom as a commodity that flows down through the hierarchy from the wise to the ignorant.

For me, the notion of Buddha Nature is just another way of talking about the dharmakāya level of mind. It leads all members of the Sangha who are familiar with the idea, to begin to entertain the possibility that there is something of the dharmic order ‘within’ us all – unconditionally present in every moment. The idea that the presence of the dharmakāya may be recognised in the universal experience of Consciousness, has what may be called an ‘equalising’ effect on Sangha relationships. It gives a powerful impetus to the Sangha’s practice of Mindfulness when the conceptual framing of the practice is lifted out of the heroic ‘self-development’ frame through the idea that Consciousness is a manifestation of the universal dharmakāya – the eternal dimension of mind. While a hierarchy obviously continues to exist in regard to all aspects of knowledge, virtue and capability; within the three-fold perspective, the general sense of hierarchy is not so absolute – and is less likely to be experienced as a hierarchy of value.

Although it is regarded, sometimes in a rather unthinking way, as an essential idea, by many Buddhists, for me, the idea that some people are of greater value than others is problematic. Clearly, there is human development – human development in multiple dimensions of awareness, character and skill – and the valuing of this development towards the perfection of Buddhahood is essential to the Buddhist tradition. This idea has a Shadow however – it can find expression in arrogance and close-mindedness, and paradoxically in a devaluing or denial of people’s experience. If in the spirit of the bodhisattva, we are truly interested in the well-being of others who are less developed than ourselves, it is not enough to teach them – we must be willing to listen to them as well; and we must value their experience and their feedback. There is a Middle Way that must be found, or we risk promoting individual and cultural traits that are antithetical to the fundamentals of Buddhism. While clearly it is important that those who have studied and practiced the Dharma, or have worked for the Dharma, should be deserving of our profound respect, we must guard against the idea that others are not deserving of respect – an idea that easily gains currency when the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective is adopted exclusively.

I shall be returning to this theme. It is necessary to understand why advocates of the ‘self-development’ perspective tend to de-value the three-fold perspective, and the ‘self-discovery’ perspective in particular. We must recognise the potential for harm that is associated with this prejudice. I am a passionate believer in the idea of a thoughtfully eclectic Western Buddhism, and I believe that it is appropriate for Western Buddhists to be discerning and selective about what aspects of traditional Buddhist philosophy and practice they adopt. We need to be aware of the effect of this selection process however, on the philosophical culture of the Sangha.

I am of the view that Western Buddhism should be a diverse, eclectic mix, curated to create a distinctively Western three-fold synthesis – rather than just a transplantation of particular ethnic Buddhist traditions in their entirety. The different choices made by those who are creating Western Sangha cultures, need to take care to create an appropriate blend of these three archetypal cultural perspectives, since their member’s overall experience of Sangha, and of Buddhist practice, depends on these choices. We need to be sure that, in our process of selection, a three-fold balance is being created – and that we are not imposing our Western prejudices on the Buddhist tradition.

These questions highlight for us the way in which a heroic and socially constructed identity is not ultimately a good basis for personal ethical responsibility. An ethical sensibility can, and often does, initially develop as a form of idealism, and out of a social identification with the values set out in the ethical precepts of Buddhism. This is just the first level of ethics practice however, and the modern world confronts us with complex ethical challenges that require much deeper investigation and much deeper self-enquiry. The traditional ethical precepts and the guidance of our spiritual superiors can only serve us up to a point – we must ultimately find a deep internal basis for our ethical sensibility. While it has its place at an early stage, we cannot live our lives guided by a sense of what others may think of us – the development of an ethical sensibility cannot be separated from the much more subtle, and more difficult-to-define idea of becoming an individual.

Ultimately, personal responsibility, ethical discernment, and individuality are rooted in the depth of our relationship with the dharmic reality – not in the good intentions of the heroic ego. I believe that the practice of all four of the brahmavihāras (Loving-Kindness; Equanimity; Compassion; and Appreciative Joy) provides our best route to both this deeper ethical discernment, and to that subtle spiritually-grounded metaphysical autonomy that we call individuality. Through an ‘other-power’ approach to the brahmavihāras practice we can experience, the faint bodily-felt resonance of the dharmic reality – and it is this subtle internal connection that sets us on the path to individuality and a deeper ethics. The ‘other-power’ approach to the brahmavihāras, approaches them as the mahabrahmavihāras (the ‘great’ brahmavihāras) associated with the Buddhas of the quadrants of the mandala. So, it sees the brahmavihāras as archetypal forces that exist objectively and collectively on the sambhogakāya level of mind. By framing our engagement with them in this ‘other-power’ way, there is the potential to achieve a much deeper transformation – the potential to become familiar with, rooted in, and guided by, the dharmic reality itself. I shall be reflecting upon this approach to brahmavihāras practice in more detail in a later chapter.

Ethics and non-violence in our decision-making, communication and conduct, needs more than a set of ideals and a heroic moral will – it requires us to commit to a deep psychological transformation of our mental and emotional nature. It needs comprehensive cognitive-perceptual awareness and multi-dimensional empathy – and this sort of breadth of awareness and empathy is not a strength of the heroic ego. To be deeply and instinctively ethical, we need Equanimity (upekshā) and Loving Kindness (maitri), and we need Compassion (karunā) and Appreciative Joy (muditā). When, through the practice of ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’, we realise that each of these brahmavihāras are qualities of our own deepest true nature – that they are inherently present in our experience as archetypal powers at the sambhogakāya level of mind, as the mahabrahmavihāras (the ‘great’ brahmavihāras of Mahyāna tradition). Then we also realise that we are living in a universe that has love, and therefore ethics, woven into its primordial fabric. And ultimately, we recognise that these two realisations – the objective ‘other-power’ reality of love, and subjective reality of love ‘within’ – are not separate.

One of the themes of the second part of this essay (in my next chapter) is the need for us to recognise that the development of our ethical sensibility begins as a provisional and socially-constructed set of guidelines, or precepts, and then undergoes and process of refinement – a process in which its socially-constructed nature is transcended and it instead becomes a deeply authentic expression of our internal connection with the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya realities of our being. We need to undergo a transition in the basis of our ethics. Initially, our ethics are socially-defined ethics, and in involve heroic ideals and commitment to practice of the ethical precepts that we have publicly committed to – ethics defined as behavioural aims and objectives. Eventually however, we are seeking the instinctive ethics of the true individual – an ethical sensibility that arises spontaneously when our cognition and perception are guided by the mahabrahmavihāras within.

The radical difference between the ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ approaches to ethics can sometimes bring differences of opinion on ethical questions – and even conflict. Great self-awareness and integrity of character is required, but a Middle Way reconciliation of these two perspectives will inevitably emerge provided that we allow our meditation practice deepens and to take on a more ‘other-power’ character. Paradoxically it is the heroic ‘self-development’ approach to practice that, while it appears more focused on ethics, is more likely to lead to ethical lapses – while particular behavioural commitments may be followed meticulously, larger ethical incongruities are more likely. This paradox is difficult to explain, but I hope to provide an explanation in this book. As a starting point we need to recognise that identification with an imagined personal will is deeply problematic, as if an identity in which we believe that we are wise and good, while other people (or parts of ourselves) are foolish and bad.

The ‘other-power’ power approach to Buddhism, because it is focused on recognising that the dharmic reality is the primary reality and the source all goodness and wisdom, generally has no difficulty in recognising that we are flawed and foolish beings – even as we aspire to become a bodhisattva. The context of our lives is the conditioned mind and world of the nirmānakāya, and the conditions of this mundane reality will always tend to resist our integration of the sublime qualities of the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya, however open and receptive we may be. Shinran, founder of the Jodo Shinshu, had a rather beautiful way of expressing this humility. He would say that the true ‘other-power’ practitioner is always keenly aware that he or she is a bonpu (pronounced ‘bombu’) – a foolish being.

I find myself thinking that perhaps the main value of heroic idealism in the spiritual life is that it takes us to that threshold of deeper and more transformative practice in which the heroic egoic mind is progressively seen through and transcended. Until we have really connected with the Middle Way, and have connected with that clarity of intention that Buddhism calls Going For Refuge, the heroic determination of the egoic mind and the urging of more experienced others will have their place. Once we are committed to the path, and are sitting on the meditation cushion however, or are engaging in self-enquiry, then the heroic identity must learn, over time, to step back and allow the unfolding that is trying to happen. To open to ‘other power’, is to recognise a mode of practice that opens to the dharmic reality as the source of our healing, of our true identity, of our ethics, and of our spiritual guidance. It is better that we think of the heroic and the Middle Way as opposite approaches within personal development – not the same.

The culture of renunciation that necessarily coloured the history of the Buddha’s community of monks, and has informed the various monastic traditions that were founded in his name, gives us a very particular set of images and attitudes. It is very easy, to frame the Buddha’s ‘Going Forth’ into a life of spiritual practice, simply as a heroic act – as an act that can be narrowly and exclusively framed in terms of ‘self-development’. The heroic dimension of that incident in the Buddha’s life, prior to his Enlightenment, can distract us however, from the fact that neither the Buddha’s Going Forth, nor his actual Enlightenment process, can ever be adequately understood simply in heroic terms.

The Buddha’s Going Forth was not just an expression of heroic self-determination. Rather it was a response, and an act of ‘self-surrender’, to the intuitively felt ‘other-power’ principle of the bodhicitta that was calling the Buddha from beyond the egoic mind – calling him in the depths of his being. Similarly, the Buddha’s Enlightenment was absolutely not simply an achievement of his will – however much that achievement involved great determination and commitment along the way. The Buddha makes it very clear that his Enlightenment involved a giving up of his emphasis on ‘self-power’ and goal orientation, and involved the paradoxical recognition that the germ of what he was seeking was already present – primordially present and recognised as having already been present even in his early childhood.

This cannot be emphasised enough. The Westerner who responds to Buddhism, may be doing so precisely because Buddhism is seen as providing a framework for the non-theistic ‘other-power’ spirituality that has been spontaneously emerging in their life. Many Westerners have experiences which can only be described as forms of direct experience of the transcendental reality – while also having a keen sense that Christianity is not the path that they would chose to give meaning and context to those experiences. Glimpses of the dharmic reality can just arise – like the Buddha’s childhood experience of blessedness as he sat under a rose apple tree watching his father at work. ‘Other-power’ experiences of this sort serve to challenge our scientific materialism and sow the seeds for more systemic Dharma practice later in life. It is a mistake to devalue such experiences, or any of the ecstatic or visionary experiences that we may have along the way, just because they do not have meaning within a ‘self-development’ perspective, and are not reflected in concrete behavioural personality changes.

While such experiences cannot necessarily be seen as evidence of character transformation, we need to acknowledge that they can nevertheless serve as very important points of reference in the individual’s process of beginning to acknowledge the dharmic reality. They serve to open us to the perspective of ‘other-power’ and should be welcomed and validated. Such experiences should not even be recognised as personal. While they appear to arise in apparent individuals, in reality that are arising within the spiritual-social system of a community of practice – within the Sangha. Meditation experiences, especially visionary experiences of the archetypal Buddhas, are experiences of the collective unconscious, and it is therefore appropriate to view them, not as individual experiences at all, but potentially as messages from the intelligence of the dharmic reality to the community of practice in which they appear. By bearing witness to our moments of intuitive recognition of the dharmic reality, in whatever subtle or dramatic ways they might happen, we are supporting our fellow Sangha members to also make that transition to that Middle Way mode of practice that integrates ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’.

The heroic ‘self-development’ perspective has a place, provided that it is nested within an ‘other-power’ view – and ultimately within a ‘self-discovery’, or ‘self-enquiry’ perspective. The heroic individual for whom the personal will is at the heart of his identity, can, even if his goals are framed in spiritual terms, become disconnected – dissociated even – and it would be easy to imagine male Buddhas to be the same. We need to take care therefore, to be really clear that Buddhas are profoundly relational beings, and we need to recognise the integration processes of the Buddha’s Middle Way as the subtle and relational reconciliation processes that they are. When we come to look deeply at the skandhas in future chapters of this book, we will find that the cognitive-perceptual system that we take to be a self, is made up of multiple internal relationships between Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) and the rest of the cognitive-perceptual skandhas, and between all the dynamic pairings and polarities that exist between the skandha system’s various ‘internal’, ‘external’, and complementary components. When we use the skandhas as a framework for self-enquiry, we realise that relationship is woven into the fabric of who we are – and that relationship must be the path to our cognitive-perceptual wholeness and our freedom.

The heroic attitude does not lend itself to these complex and multifaceted integration processes and to the development of expanded awareness. Indeed it can have the opposite effect. The Hero is the archetype of the egoic mind. It is the archetype of that conscious attitude that tends to polarise against the unconscious and therefore does not relate to less conscious, but nevertheless important, dimensions of ourselves in a way that might draw them into consciousness and integrate them. One of the gifts in Buddhism’s mandala model of the structure of the psyche, is that it shows us the multiple polarities in that structure – each of which are, as likely as not, to become polarities of consciousness and unconsciousness in the egoic mind. When we recognise that the body-mind and the cognitive-perceptual system of Consciousness has this structure, and this tendency to fall into polarities of conscious and unconscious functioning, it becomes very clear that integration cannot happen solely through the heroic ‘self-development’ approach.

We need to understand that the Middle Way, does not simply give free rein to the heroic, and to the personal will. Rather it presents us with a much more subtle path which endeavours to fully integrate the ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ perspectives into a third perspective which transcends both. This means that the Middle Way is very difficult to conceptualise, and a great deal of the conceptual clarity and detail the Buddha must have presented in regard to it, has tended to become lost in the early centuries of the Buddhist tradition – which was, we should always remember, an oral tradition for four hundred years before it was written down. While the Middle Way is, in my view, better articulated in the Tibetan Vajrayāna, and in aspects of Pure Land Buddhism, its presentation there is also elusive, and easily obscured by Buddhism’s cultural richness and complexity.

There is a Tibetan Vajrayana term that many students of Buddhism will be familiar with – Dzogchen – which means ‘great completion’ or ‘great perfection’. This is a way of thinking about the Dharma that has much to offer the ‘self-discovery’ practitioner, and those who are in search of the three-fold synthesis and the Buddha’s Middle Way. In the Tibetan Buddhist cultural context, Dzogchen training is presented in very particular traditional ways, so that the essence of it can be very difficult for the Westerner to discern. I have come to think of it however, as Sangharakshita did, as essentially a very comprehensive and complete perspective on Mindfulness practice, and closely related to the ‘other-power’ approach to the brahmavihāras that I have mentioned above. It is also a very direct and effective path to wisdom, because it encourages us to recognise that the ground of our being is in the dharmic reality – that we are not the egoic identity that we have created for ourselves in this nirmānakāya world.

Dzogchen is also perhaps, just another way of thinking about the eternal return of the compassionate bodhisattva. It invites us to find experientially within ourselves, a transcendence of the stark existential dichotomy of dharmakāya and nirmānakāya – and urges us to recognise the benevolent presence of the eternal in each moment of Consciousness. Responding to this invitation to ‘self-discovery’, we may reframe the way we think about Enlightenment, so that Enlightenment is no longer negatively framed as a personal escape from the irredeemable tragedy and suffering of this world. Rather it becomes a purposeful surrender into this world, borne from a deep life-embracing compassion. So, Enlightenment, within this ‘self-discovery’ perspective, involves the intention to rest ‘in’ and ‘as’ the dharmakāya, and a systematic embodiment of the sambhogakāya, so that our life becomes a spontaneous act of offering service to the collective process of our world – a world in which the misery of samsara and the freedom of nirvana exist simultaneously and inseparably.

So, Dzogchen is an example, from Tibetan Buddhism, of the perspective that I have been calling Vajrayāna or ‘self-discovery’. It is the perspective which calls on us to recognise that the dharmakāya is ever-present in this nirmānakāya world – to recognise the benevolent transcendental reality of Consciousness and to turn towards it. It is a ‘self-discovery’, or ‘self-enquiry’ path in which we seek to recognise that in us which is already at peace – and to rest ‘as’ that, initially only for short moments of Mindfulness, but eventually more continuously so that we gain a deep familiarity with it. The peace that we seek is beyond the egoic mind. Even if we have become very accomplished at using the egoic will to calm and pacify the mind, the ultimate peace of Enlightenment is always beyond the reach of the egoic will, and of the ‘self-development’ perspective. The Middle Way perspective requires us to look beyond the egoic mind – not only to relate to that which is beyond us; but to shift out of the egoic way of being, into a new openness in which we recognise that the transcendent dharmic mystery is at the core of who we are.

I have been reflecting on the psychological dangers that are inherent in the Western mind’s preference for the heroic mindset, and in the way it tends to frame Buddhism as a path of ‘self-power’, or ‘self-development’. What I am highlighting here is an archetypal dynamic that is very important, not just in male psychology and in the psychology of those who are drawn to Buddhism, but in the collective psychology of the West, which is the ultimate context of these reflections. I shall be reflecting on the wider Western context separately, but in the Buddhist context, it is clearly apparent that those who have a positive-mother-complex are often gifted individuals and confident public speakers, and they tend to speak with great conviction. Unfortunately, they tend to generalise from their experience as heroes-of-the-mother, even though their experience leads them to an extreme view that is far from the Buddha’s Middle Way.

Clearly, those of a positive-mother-complex temperament have very different psychological needs to those of the negative-mother-complex temperament. The seemingly-positive ‘hero-of-the-mother’ psychology is completely different from the bodhisattva psychology that it might superficially resemble, but the figure of the bodhisattva is often presented as if it were essentially identical to the Western Hero. This confusion is inevitably very prevalent because those of the ‘hero-of-the-mother’ temperament are bound to tend to rise to positions of leadership in Buddhist organisations in the West – unless perhaps there are feedback mechanisms within such organisations that facilitate more balance and wisdom. Like all religious organisations in the West, Buddhist organisations can easily become ultra-hierarchical, in the sense that power and information generally flow downwards through the organisation from the top. This episcopal mode of governance is both ‘affirmed by’ and ‘affirming of’ the military-heroic mindset. This archetypal tendency is something we need to be keenly aware of if we are committed to building effective Sangha, and I hope to write more on this in the future.

I am talking in the language of archetypal psychology here – the psyche’s own language of archetypal principles and images. The Mother, in this context is Mother Nature, and may be characterised as the archetype of that in the conditioned world that appears to love and nurture us – but only in the very limited way in which the biologically conditioned nirmānakāya world can love and nurture us. The Buddhist tradition bears witness to a fundamentally different source of love and nurture however – the spiritual love and nurture that comes from familiarity with, and direct relationship with, the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya. I hope to show by the end of this book that systematic practice informed by the trikāya perspective can overcome this dichotomy. There is a sense in which the potent and penetrating dharmakāya, which is most often depicted iconographically as masculine, is ultimately also an aspect of the Mother – indeed, although it is that most consistent and truly benevolent aspect of the divine feminine, we nevertheless generally fail to recognise it.

This theme of the healing of this split in the Mother archetype is something I would like to give time to later in this book, but I would like to briefly introduce it here. Many Buddhists associate the sublime ending of the Heart Sutra with the voluptuous, benevolent, and ‘motherly’ figure of the female Buddha, Prajñāpāramitā. It is as if we come to recognise, in the restful and radiant holding presence of Prajñāpāramitā, a primordial feminine benevolence in ourselves and in our world – and for many this energy is evoked by the recitation of her mantra at the end of a Buddhist puja (worship). A beautiful white female Buddha figure, she is closely related to Ākāshadhātvishvāri, who we find in the centre of Padmasambhava’s Dharmadhātu Mandala. Prajñāpāramitā is a personification of non-dual realisation, and of the bodhisattva’s final, utterly peaceful, coming-to-rest in the dharmakāya – even as he or she is drawn into the selfless response of concrete and practical engagement with the nirmānakāya world’s suffering. At the outset however, we need to face the stark duality of our habitual identification with time-bound Mother Nature and with the nirmānakāya – acknowledging it fully, but turning towards the dharmakāya and learning to rest ‘as’ Consciousness.

To be a ‘hero-of-the-mother’ is to be blessed with a range of very positive and supportive developmental experiences in childhood and early life – to have health, strength, confidence, and will power; and a seemingly uncomplicated psychology. Such individuals do have their fears and their blind-spots however, because – in archetypal terms – the Negative Mother archetype is strongly constellated in the unconscious. So, for these individuals, Buddhist practice appears to offer a validation for their natural temperament, and a way of maintaining and developing positive states – a way of hanging onto, and developing, the egoic strength and range of skills that life has blessed them with.

Many come to Buddhism from a very different place however – and with a very different fundamental impulse or motivation. Indeed, the individual at the opposite extreme may come to Buddhism burdened by the conditioning that comes from a childhood and early adulthood that was full of trauma, deprivation and failure. Such a person may be disabled by unconscious emotional conflicts so that they have very little psychological energy available even though they are deeply and genuinely motivated. They may lack even the basic physical health and neurological capacity to focus the mind and meditate.

There is value in acknowledging both of these extremes, firstly because they provide us with opposite points of reference that are necessary for psychological reflection, but also because Buddhism specifically seeks to acknowledge both these extremes – and because the dharmakāya holds both these extremes in its unconditional and affirming embrace. What Buddhism offers is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but an all-encompassing and infinitely adaptive approach. We cannot all become a ‘hero-of-the-mother’ – if that was not our fate – but we can all become bodhisattvas, we can all give our gift, and we can all feel loved and nurtured in our relationship with the dharmic reality. We can all gain an appreciative familiarity with the dharmic dimension, absolutely available and reliable; and can ‘Go For Refuge’ to it. The process of becoming healed and whole will follow directly from the depth of our ‘other-power’ relationship of ‘self-surrender’ to the dharmic reality – not from heroic effort.

There is a widely held view among Western students of Buddhism that the Dharma represents a form of ‘spiritual’ psychology. The Dharma however, is only a spiritual psychology to the extent that it includes an ‘other-power’ dimension – to the extent that its transcendental, or dharmic dimension, is well integrated into our understanding of it. At worst, Westerners seem to fail to engage with those aspects of the Dharma that are most ‘spiritual’ – most challenging to our Western scientific materialism and heroic mindset. There is also often a tendency to simultaneously dismiss Western psychology as lacking a spiritual dimension, so that we fail to make use of highly relevant and compatible Western psychological concepts, while also often making use of forms of Western psychology that are entirely inappropriate and incompatible – and using them in inaccurate and un-thought-through ways.

The heroic mindset reduces our experience in the ways that I have begun to explain. It tends to rejects more sophisticated psychologies like that of Carl Jung, just as it rejects the Buddha’s Middle Way. At worst this distrust of Western psychology, leads to undifferentiated psychological rationalisations of aspects of ancient Buddhist social practices in the context of monasticism. A striking example of this, is the very crude idea that the core of a man’s psychological challenges as he engages with the Dharma can be framed in terms of a need to ‘leave mother’. This could be described as a form of un-thought-through archetypal psychology, but it bears no relationship to that of Carl Jung and his tradition.

The Buddha was a man who had a lot of sexual experience as a young man followed by a period of marriage and family life in his early adulthood. The narrative that says that he then left all that behind and became a shrāmana, and frames that decision to be celibate as a heroic renunciation that was absolutely necessary, and somehow integral to his subsequent Enlightenment, has a compelling logic within the ‘self-development’ frame of reference – but it misses several strands of essential understanding, and is misleading to Western practitioners of the Buddha’s teachings. This mixture of principles, imagery, history and mythology may be difficult for the male Western Buddhist practitioner to unravel and contextualise – especially if we are viewing the Dharma predominantly through the lens of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective.

It is as if, as Western Buddhists, we need to acknowledge at the outset that the Buddha’s example is, quite simply not helpful to us, in this instance – our cultural situation is too different for the Buddha’s approach to be generally applicable and appropriate. Perhaps even more importantly, the collective unconscious is too different also – a fundamental factor, which I shall be returning to. So, we have to acknowledge that there is in fact a very significant gap in the historical teachings of the Buddha, as we see them laid out in the Pali Canon. It may seem alarming for me to put it as bluntly this, but in one of the most fundamental areas of life where we are seeking spiritual guidance – the area of sexuality – Gautama Buddha and the Early Buddhist tradition, has almost nothing useful to say to most Western spiritual students.

However appropriate and wise it may be, for individual practitioners to choose to avoid sexual relationships for a period of time, the ‘leaving mother’ idea needs to be recognised as just a somewhat crude way of affirming the heroic perspective – and of affirming the choice that men who have a positive mother complex are likely to make. It can be argued that the use of this sort of rhetoric as a way of generally discouraging men from having sexual relationships with women so that they can give their energy to Dharma practice and the support of the Sangha’s development goals, while it appears to be in alignment with the Buddha’s teachings, is as likely to harm the reputation of the Dharma as it is to deepen the culture of practice within the Sangha. While this sort of talk seems easily justified by a superficial reading of ancient Buddhist history, the heroic idea that the male heterosexual impulse is inherently regressive sets men up for failure, shame and depression, and paradoxically leads to a coarsening rather than a refinement of their relationships with women.

Experienced Western Buddhists who have given this thought, and perhaps even tried to test the Buddha’s ancient Indian social and psychological assumptions in the Western context, usually come to the understanding that we need to take a step back and apply much more fundamental spiritual principles to our sexuality and sexual lifestyle. It seems that most of us need to completely abandon the ancient Indian advice of the Buddha in this area. Instead, we simply need to give great importance, not only to becoming deeply ethical in our sexual expression; we must also find ways of making our sexuality an expression of our highest aspirations, and of the highest teachings of the Dharma. Most importantly, for those who have entered deeply into the heroic Western framing of the values and attitudes of Buddhist monasticism, we must release the idea that sexual relationships represent a form of spiritual failure; or a ‘lesser’ path; or a self-abandonment to egoic ‘craving’, ‘desire’, and ‘attachment’.

For me, it seems we need to find perspective by going back to the trikāya and the Middle Way – the teachings that I outlined in my last chapter. Sexuality is too big a part of us to be ignored, and for most of us it cannot be managed in a spirit of heroic renunciation within the crude psychologies of the ‘self-development’ approach to practice. It has to be embraced as the archetypal and instinctual reality that it is. It has to become a domain of spiritual practice – an arena in which we express not just our highest ethical and aesthetic ideals, but the wise and benevolent depth of the dharmic level of our being. It has to be informed by a sense of the Loving Kindness, Appreciation, Compassion and Equanimity of the dharmic ‘other-power’. If we approach it in this way, we are likely to find ourselves in the ‘self-discovery’ territory of the Vajrayāna – embodying the dharmic reality; recognising it as immanent in our love-making, and in our spiritual bond with our sexual partner. We may find ourselves humbled by forces beyond the egoic – and having moments in which we intuitively recognise that ‘transcendence’ is not such a good term for the goal of the Middle Way; that the path is one of learning to allow both the transcendent dharmic reality and this embodied experience to be simultaneously present and reconciled.

In the past, I have seen various heroic generalisations about sexuality, of the sort that I have described in the paragraphs above, being presented with great conviction by Buddhists, and while many choose to simply ignore these ideas, it seems important to examine them because this critique also offers us important insights into the problematic nature of the heroic mindset. It needs to be recognised that although the heroic psychology that polarises against our instinctive life has a rhetorical power within a heroic world-view, such ideas can be shown to be intellectually un-thought-through, and even dishonest – and they are usually asserted by men of the ‘hero-of-the-mother’ temperament. It also needs to be pointed out that a psychological view that places all women, and all female potential sexual partners, in the same vaguely negative category as the ‘mother’ in male psychology, is just incorrect and generally unhelpful.

Clearly, the male practitioner who, in early adulthood, or middle age, or even old age, still appears to be disabled by various defensive psychological patterns and dysfunctional adaptations learned in childhood, is in some sense still conditioned by his relationship with his mother (and father) at that time. I have already spoken about the unfortunate tendency to reductively frame the Buddha’s ‘Going Forth’ as validation for the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. This rhetorical position is often extended to make the psychological parallel between the Buddha’s heroic ‘Going Forth’ (leaving behind family and the ‘worldly life’ and taking up celibacy and spiritual practice), and our engagement with a process of psychological transformation in order to leave behind all of our ‘family of origin’ conditioning. Unfortunately, the idea that these two represent psychological parallels, and that both may be adequately conceptualised within the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, does not hold up in practice – because such healing of our ‘family of origin’ conditioning usually needs very much more psychological sophistication than the heroic ‘self-development’ approach can provide.

To make the judgemental assumption that a man is ‘too close to his mother’ for example, as a way of explaining his lack of integration and will-power, does not help us understand such a man, and does not really support that man’s process in any way. My first thought in response to such an idea, is that the person who comes out of their childhood in state of confusion and psychological broken-ness is no closer to their mother than the individual with a positive-mother-complex. On further reflection however, I find myself wanting to point out the fact that those strong-ego individuals who embrace the heroic framing of the Dharma most readily, are experiencing the blessing of their mother’s nurturing and unconditional love every moment of every day, and although they may be entirely unconscious of it, they are profoundly conditioned by that experience. This is one of the reasons why the term ‘hero-of-the-mother’, as used in archetypal psychology, is so useful – it serves to highlight this paradox. The person whose psychological dysfunction shows as chronic anxiety and depression in early adulthood, far from being ‘too close to their mother’, could be better characterised as one who appears to have no mother inside – and very likely no father also.

I feel a need to clarify the notion of the positive and negative mother complexes even further, because they are so relevant to the question of the heroic and its limitations – and to the larger investigation into the nature of the self that Buddhism engages in. When Carl Jung used this terminology, he was using it as one tiny part in a much larger and more comprehensive model, and he was using it in a very general way in order to lay out conceptually on a crude one-dimensional spectrum, the great variety and mixture of psychological defences that we learn in childhood. At one end of the spectrum we have the more obviously psychologically damaged negative-mother-complex individual that I have spoken about – the individual whose challenges and deprivations in childhood and youth were too great. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the positive-mother-complex individual, who has good genetics, and strong physical and mental health, who grew up in material plenty, and in a nurturing and supportive environment with optimum challenges that served to build personality qualities and confidence.

It is important to remember that in this context ‘Mother’, for Jung, was an archetype, not just the nurturing personal mother, but the archetype of all that nurtures and supports life and growth – including but not limited to, the actual mother. So, talk of the positive and negative mother-complexes can be thought of as a sort of psychological short-hand, and we need to go much deeper into this frame of reference if we are to understand it – and reveal how it relates to the dichotomies of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’; and of ‘self-development’ and ‘self-surrender’.

Provided that we do not start imagining that this is all that the spiritual life is, there is always value in asking ourselves how we might optimise the conditions of our life, and there will certainly be times when solitude, or single-sex retreats, and periods of ‘single’ life, will be helpful. Any generalised diagnosis and prescription in this regard is probably inappropriate however, because it can also be argued that the opposite is true. Carl Jung can help us a little here. He would take the view that a heterosexual man, if he is physically and psychologically strong enough to relate to a woman, should in a prudent and discerning way follow his natural instinct to love, appreciate and care for a woman – precisely because of the great power of the erotic bond to precipitate deep processes of psychological healing and personal growth. We are no longer living in ancient India, and contraception is available, so we are free to consider the possibility that the erotic pull towards deep mutual connection and intimacy has a positive purpose – that it may lead to a healing, and to a deepening of our humanity, of our wisdom, and of our capacity to love.

Indeed, Carl Jung, told us quite explicitly that it is the development of the ‘anima’ – i.e. the constellation of an inner feminine within the man through his discerning and conscious relationships with women – that heals that accumulation of positive or negative childhood conditioning that we can call the mother-complex. Based on years of investigation into himself and others, he would take the view that, if there is a regressive component in the man’s heterosexual bond, the relationship will generally have the effect of making it conscious and precipitating a healing – or the relationship will fail. When the inner feminine within the man (Jung’s anima archetype) is separated from the mother-complex, there is a potential for him to go through a process of transformation that brings mental and emotional stability and even wisdom. Ultimately, anima, in Jung’s view, is a man’s capacity to relate inwardly to the core of his authentic self – to the ground of his being and the ‘other-power’ source of his individuality. What most people observe in a spiritually mature man, is that to the extent that he relates with depth and authenticity to the woman in his life, he precipitates an equivalent internal relational process within himself.

By separating the mother archetype from the rest of the archetypal feminine, which we can call anima, Jung profoundly challenges the crude heroic conceptualisations that we sometimes hear put forward in Buddhist contexts. I believe there are different integration processes within the psyche of homosexual men, but in the heterosexual man (i.e. in my own experience), it is quite simply incorrect to make any general statements about spiritual development in men requiring some sort of generalised renunciation of relationships with woman. The theory that such a renunciation is necessary to brings about an integration of the archetypally feminine characteristics within the male heterosexual’s personality through ‘taking back the projection’ appears to be incorrect.

I have no doubt that integration processes of this sort may be possible and appropriate for the celibate practitioner in the context of a true ‘other-power’ spiritual culture. I would even say that celibacy and solitude may precipitate the practitioner’s recognition of the dharmic ‘other-power’ reality – I have had several experiences in meditation that indicate that this is true. Celibacy and solitude should not be regarded as essential however. Indeed, in the absence of a true ‘other-power’ Sangha culture in Western Buddhism, intimate relationships may be the best way of really allowing ourselves to encounter the ‘other’. Also, in the absence of a true ‘other-power’ spirituality, there is no guarantee that celibacy will lead to the wholesome, integrated psycho-spiritual state that Indian tradition calls brahmacharya. Brahman, we need to remember is the Vedic Sanskrit word for the dharmic reality in which we rest. The ‘other-power’ culture of the collective psychological situation of ancient India provided a much better context for renunciation of this sort, than does the heroic ‘self-development’ culture of the modern West, with its pervasive defences against the ever-present loving reality of the divine.

While we can see that in the Eastern cultural context, a real ‘other-power’ relationship with female archetypal Buddha figures could facilitate an integration of this sort, the Westerner who becomes preoccupied with pushing away women, is unlikely to be integrating qualities that have an archetypal feminine character. Indeed, they are in danger of ending up alienated, emotionally conflicted, and deeply regretful of the choices they have made. When we step out of the heroic perspective we realise how unwise it is to make generalisations about these processes. The ‘self-development’ view so easily leads to a mentality of ‘self-overcoming’; of ‘self-conquest’; of ‘denial of desire’; of ‘mind-over-matter’; of cutting off from the body; and to a mistaken renunciation of life impulses that are actually healthy, life-serving, and necessary. While renunciation is important, we need to be thoughtful and discerning about what we renounce. I would even say that renunciation of this sort should never be practiced out of a merely heroic mindset, but only considered when a real bodily-felt ‘other-power’ spirituality has become deeply established. We need to remember that development of heroic will-power and the practice of renunciation, will never, on their own, lead to Enlightenment.

I apologise if I appear to be focusing on the needs of Buddhist men here, but because men have a gender-affinity with the Hero archetype, they are much more prone to falling into a one-sidedly heroic perspective. As Western Buddhists we need to bring clarity to the idea of renunciation – so that we can validate what is healthy in that idea, while going beyond the merely heroic, and going entirely beyond any generalised condemnation of heterosexuality. This is why I have felt a need to establish the fact that men are just as likely to integrate inner feminine qualities by relating appreciatively to women, as by renouncing sexual relationships. This may seem very un-heroic, and is certainly divergent from the monastic cultural emphasis of the Buddhist Pali Canon, but we need to go further however and explicitly state that, for a heterosexual man in a Western context, genuinely loving a woman is not just spiritually worthwhile in itself – because genuine loving is always worthwhile – but can be a powerfully transformative path in life, and a valid option within the range of possible spiritual lifestyle choices.

I shall be saying more about the dimensions of love and loving in a future chapter in relation to the brahmavihāras, but for now let it be understood that there is likely to be a particular spiritually transformative power, for a heterosexual man, in genuinely loving a woman – not least because, as Jung explained, his own soul has an archetypally feminine character. Soul is a notion that is much loved by archetypal psychologists, who use it variously as a way of talking about the archetypal feminine and about the totality of the psyche, but it is extremely difficult to define. Soul does not refer to either the heroic ego, or to the separate self that the Buddha sought to de-construct in his anatman and five skandhas teachings. Indeed soul, being explicitly not just personal, but nevertheless inclusive of the apparently personal, is in some ways quite a good word to describe the totality of the experienced body-mind with its inherent resonances of the immanent dharmic reality.

One of the main reasons why I have found it so important to offer a critique of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective that often predominates in Western Buddhism, is that is appears to generate so many narrow and starkly untrue interpretations of the Dharma. Indeed, such are the terrible misunderstandings of how best to apply Buddhist principles in the Western context, that are generated by practitioners who strongly preference the heroic ‘self-development’ frame of reference, that the pathology of the heroic perspective is very clear. It seems that the thinking of those who exclusively and one-sidedly embrace this perspective becomes unreflective and narrow – while they at the same time tend to assert their beliefs with fierce conviction, seemingly intent on imposing their views on other people.

I have already spoken of my observation that the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective tends to advocate, not just respect for those in leadership roles, but strict top-down hierarchical governance, that at worst is almost militaristic. Not surprisingly, this leads any Buddhist organisation that exclusively embraces the ‘self-development’ perspective to become closed to the feedback up through the organisation that might bring a correction of its errors. While we might imagine that heroic idealism is automatically good and necessary and functional, invariably, in my experience, it is not. Tragically, when the idea of ‘self-surrender’ is given prominence within such a ‘self-development’-orientated Buddhist culture, it can express itself in an unhealthy way. Instead of finding expression in a real ‘other-power’ spirituality, it is used to affirm and rationalise a self-sacrificial culture of domination and self-domination.

While part of my motivation in sharing these thoughts is to support critical reflection within Buddhist organisations, it needs to understood that our unconscious immersion in the Hero myth is a psychological dysfunction that affects the whole collective West – indeed this dysfunction has shaped the history of the 20th Century to an extraordinary degree, and continues to impose its delusional imprint on the 21st. If we are studying Buddhism in the West, and perhaps also concerned about male psychology, it is worth reflecting on our collective psychological history.

We need to be aware that, at the end of the 19th Century, the call for women’s suffrage, and the related social changes to relationships between men and women, initially led to a reactionary backlash where the men of the West at that time surrendered themselves in the heroic, and exclusively-male, and deeply irrational, project of WW1. It may be argued that that horrific war served as a defence of masculine identity against painful psychological processes that were manifesting in the marital bedrooms of Europe throughout the early decades of the 20th Century. WW1 revealed the profound ignorance and monumental failure of empathy that is at the heart of the defensive and dysfunctional identification of male society with the heroic – and this failure was sustained by the dysfunctional ultra-hierarchical culture of the armies that were clashing, and of European society in general at that time.

The social tumult that followed WW1, with the rise of a totalitarian Communism in Russia, and the rise of fascism in Spain and Germany needs to be viewed as the bizarre and tragic collective psychological aberration that it was – and it needs to be studied again and again, because it has such important things to teach us about the nature of our humanity. What we saw after the heroic dysfunction of WW1, was a doubling down on that heroic mind-set, and the rise of societies that were abandoning themselves to a collective psychosis in which the Hero was the guiding archetype. All across Europe, in different ways there was an embrace of the most violent, inhumane and unintelligent aspects of the hierarchical and heroic. There was a truly remarkable denial of human sensitivity and reason – and yet the descent into that madness was always framed as a form of heroic idealism and nobility.

In order to understand these historical phenomena, we need an archetypal perspective – a perspective such as the Buddha offered. The Middle Way perspective requires us to understand that, however foundational the principle of personal responsibility might be, it does not help us to reduce history to simplistic narratives about ‘bad’ individuals and ‘good’ individuals. The Buddha invited us to see society, and therefore history, as an arena in which nothing is personal in the way that we think it is. Rather, everything is a play of archetypal principles (the dharmas in the Buddha’s Mindfulness of dharmas). All the great philosophers have observed how easily the individual becomes submerged in the collective – as if a primitive tribal instinct overrides each individual’s consciousness. The archetypal dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ has great value as a way of giving some conceptual form to this dark but frequently repeating pattern – a pattern that is in many ways just as prevalent in our modern world as it has always been.

We need to understand that unrealised human beings are alone in their heroic separateness, and that without the spiritual knowledge of the sort that the Buddha’s Middle Way offers, they meet their need for ‘other-power’ through an emersion in national or tribal identity – or religious community. These two things – the painful aloneness of the heroic individual consciousness, and tendency towards the surrender of individuality through tribal and religious processes – go hand in hand. If the need for ‘other-power’ is not positively satisfied in a conscious inner relationship with the dharmic reality, then it will find expression in a negative way – in potentially, very delusional and violent ways.

When we grasp the nature of this dynamic, we get a flood of understandings about how social processes can either support an ethical sensibility, as in a well-functioning Buddhist Sangha; or can undermine ethical discernment and undermine a sense of personal responsibility, as in a Sangha that is not functioning well. The heroic and idealistic ‘self-development’ perspective, paired with an immersion in a spiritual community that embraces a heroic Buddhist idealism, might at first appear to provide a strong basis for Sangha. When we look more closely however, we see signs of organisational dysfunction – a failure of empathy; a failure of ethics; and a failure of the normal personal and organisational feedback processes that might challenge ethically aberrant behaviour.

Enlightenment is indeed a collective project. Identity is socially constructed, and so, to a large extent, is the dissolution of identity – the release of identification and personalisation. The Dharma cannot be separated from its Sangha context – from the social context in which it is presented and experienced. To make progress, we must ideally have close contact with the truly wise – we must experience Buddha and Dharma embodied in others. So, the greatest obstacles to our growth in the Dharma are the unconscious group dynamics within the Sangha. A Sangha that does not support our evolution beyond the merely heroic, and therefore does not support the emergence of individuality, will create a tormenting conflict for its participants – because they will be faced with two equally painful options. They either have to find a way of socially adapting to a group culture that is crushing what is emerging in them and resisting their development, or they must leave behind the support of the Sangha that has brought them to this threshold.

If the Sangha fails to welcome the emergence of an ‘other-power’ sensibility, it will create trauma for its participants. It will also, paradoxically, be denying what is most meaningful in the experience of Sangha. Sangha does not directly create experiences of ‘other-power’, but it does create the conditions in which we are likely to have experiences of ‘other-power’. A life of spiritual practice is likely to be filled with, and animated by, numerous subtle intuitions of ‘other-power’ – indeed we may eventually come to recognise ‘other-power’ in every moment of Mindfulness. There may also be intense blissful experiences in meditation, or visionary experiences – experiences which profoundly impact us, and become reference points in our unconscious. It may be impossible to find a place within our identity for such experiences until we have entered deeply into an ‘other-power’ perspective and found an ‘other-power’ culture of practice in which they ‘make sense’. Within a ‘self-development’ culture, we are likely to be discouraged from even trying to find words for, and sharing, these experiences, because they appear so irrelevant to the heroic processes of personality development.

These ‘other-power’ experiences happen to us as individuals, but we nevertheless naturally attribute them to, or associate them with the cultural setting in which we experienced them. They are ‘supra-personal’ experiences, arising within the non-self system, and while we naturally find ourselves wanting to locate them either ‘within’ or ‘outside’ of ourselves, we may find that we cannot – neither feels quite true. We need to be aware of this paradox – that the ‘other-power’ experiences occurring within us may not lead us to gain a clear and reliable connection with the dharmic ‘other-power’ – but instead cause us to feel spiritually bound to the Sangha culture within which they occurred, even bound to a heroic Sangha culture that denies their value. This is an important part of what Sangha is – a social bonding process through a sharing of profound experiences and intuitions; or through profound experiences and intuitions that have occurred to us in a Sangha context. But if we do not explicitly give value to the ‘other-power’ perspective, this process becomes confused and dysfunctional, and gives energy to a surrender of individuality to the ‘other-power’ of the group, rather than to a development of individuality through real relationship with the ‘other-power’ of the dharmic reality.

The deeper ethical sensibility that the Buddha was pointing to in his Middle Way teaching, is incomplete without the deeper transformation processes that are initiated by our embrace of an ‘other-power’ perspective. As Westerners, immersed as we are in what the poet William Blake called the ‘single vision’ of scientific materialism, we need to keep on reminding ourselves that the dimensions of love (the brahmavihāras) are an ‘other-power’ reality, woven into the fabric of Consciousness, and therefore of the universe, at the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya levels of mind. A Sangha may actually be undermining the development of its member’s ethical sensibility if it fails to give enough importance to the ‘other-power’ perspective. Indeed all aspects of deeper transformation and insight practice are likely to suffer.

Unfortunately, it is not only the supra-personal ‘other-power’ that the heroic view tends to deny – it is our vulnerability as well. Indeed these two things go together. The egoic mind’s heroic ‘self-development’ stance instinctively builds defences against vulnerability – against an awareness of painful feeling processes. Indeed, the heroic perspective devalues such awareness, judging it as weakness, and has the effect of constraining the release of old egoic patterning. The energetic aliveness that we seek, actually requires our openness to this uncomfortable bodily-felt experience – it requires our ability to be with our somatic experience with Loving Kindness, with Compassion and Equanimity and even Appreciative Joy. The need for this sort of self-empathetic healing process tends to be overlooked by the ‘self-development’ perspective. Rather, the depth of our capacity to be compassionately present with our experience in this way, comes from our recognition of ‘other-power’ and our integration of its brahmavihāra characteristics. Indeed, one of the essential characteristics of the dharmic reality from our point of view, is its ability to hold us compassionately – allowing us to be with old emotional pain that we could not otherwise bear to face.

Following the method of archetypal psychology, I shall be moving backwards and forwards between three closely-related areas. Firstly, I shall be reflecting on the key archetypes; secondly, I shall be reflecting on personal and social psychology that expresses those archetypes (especially in Buddhist cultures and in the more general culture of the West); and thirdly, I shall be reflecting on history, where these archetypes play out on the world stage. There is much in human history that seems to bear out the paradoxical way in which the cultural spirit of the heroic goes hand in hand with a seeming loss of humanity and ethics, and with the great mob-violence that we call war.

I am writing this in early 2024, at a time of great ethical confusion within Western societies and the curious and disturbing appearance of supposedly liberal Western governments supporting an actual genocide of Palestinians in Israel, while a war by the NATO powers to ‘weaken Russia’ (a nuclear-armed nation) has been raging for two years at the expense of more than half a million lives, and countless billions of dollars. The jingoism and propagandistic ‘journalism’ that has surrounded these events has been bizarre and shameless. We have seen an irrational tribalism and a complete loss of historical context and ethical perspective that, while it has actually been a feature of the West since WW2, we do not normally associate with the Western liberal democracies.

The Cold War saw extraordinary violence and cruelty visited upon the post-colonial developing world – as the US crushed left-leaning and non-aligned states and supported ex-colonial oligarchies and right-wing dictatorships. The foreign policy of the US, with its violent political manipulations, and coups, and military interventions was largely tolerated by the rest of the supposedly-liberal post-WW2 world-order because it was dressed up so effectively in the garb of the heroic. US foreign policy during the Cold War was cruel, anti-democratic, and often unapologetically fascist. It was completely unethical and anti-democratic, but because its interventions were framed heroically, and as necessary actions in a ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ fight, the relentless trend and scale of the inhumanity was largely ignored and forgotten.

A brief hopeful moment in that Cold War period was the anti-Vietnam-War process in which the friendship of Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn and Dr Martin Luther King played a key role. Unfortunately, the great power and effectiveness of the dark anti-democratic response of the intelligence services to this people’s revolution against the institutions of the Western war-machine, has not been understood however – democratic control of foreign policy in the Western democracies has in effect been removed in the decades that followed, while preserving the appearance of democratic process. Taking steps to ensure that Western democracies would never again be able to significantly effect foreign policy, the power of US intelligence services was massively expanded after the Vietnam War, with the establishment of numerous new alliances, think tanks, civil society organisations (including a great many serving as fronts for CIA influence in target countries), specialist public relations firms, secret independent sources of funding, and a vast covert network of links between intelligence services and media organisations.

By the 1980s, the West’s wars were either completely secret proxy-wars, or could not be effectively opposed – even when they were based on lies. The systemic phenomenon of this enhanced military-industrial-complex, is very poorly understood – those historians who study the new system’s dynamics are generally denounced as ‘conspiracy theorists’. The reality however, is that because of the tight integration of the media and intelligence services, and the power of this integration to shape the prevailing narrative, the institutions of the military, the intelligence services, and the foreign policy establishment, no longer function under democratic control. From an archetypal perspective, this loss of democracy is closely related to the way the Shadow projection of the Hero archetype brings cognitive-perceptual unconsciousness and an immersion of the individual in the national group.

The most significant war in the 1980s was Operation Cyclone (1979-89), the completely secret Afghan proxy-war in which the CIA and wealthy Saudi Islamists (facilitated by Saudi citizen, Osama Bin Laden) collaborated to fund the very successful Islamic jihadist guerrilla war that forced the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan. This proxy-war was a very significant factor in the fall of the Soviet Union – and it eventually led to the ‘blowback’ of 9/11, as the Saudi-Afghan terrorist network that the CIA had created turned on the US. Hollywood’s 2007 film, Charlie Wilson’s War, which tells the story of Operation Cyclone, is entertaining and informative, and certainly worth watching – provided that you recognise it as the hateful piece of self-congratulatory, pro-war film-making, and anti-Russian propaganda, that it is.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the self-serving course of US foreign policy continued unimpeded in a unipolar world – with cruel, expensive and extraordinarily destructive military adventures in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. We even saw massive US support of Islamic separatist terrorist groups in Russia, China, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere – simultaneously with the spending of 2 trillion US Dollars on a bogus ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan. Within the world-view of the heroic such hypocrisy is normalised – the incongruity does not reach the threshold of consciousness in the mass of people, or in that of the people’s leaders in their parliaments and TV news outlets. The enemy images are maintained, and so is the unreflective, ignorant, heroic posturing of the ‘good-and-evil’ fight.

Now, thirty years after the end of the Cold War, and a little over a century after WW1, we are again seeing trench warfare and the industrial scale slaughter of ongoing artillery duels in Europe – this time in Eastern Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian men getting slaughtered in a vague un-thought-through attempt by NATO to achieve regime-change in Russia, and to break up the Russian Federation, after decades of relentless and deeply-provocative NATO expansion finally reached its borders. This operation has been accompanied by an incredibly comprehensive ‘whole of society’ propaganda and censorship operation involving a confluence of powerful anti-democratic and pro-war forces: institutions of government (military, intelligence, contracted PR firms, and the NATO bureaucracy); private sector entities (arms manufacturers, social media platforms, banks, and private equity firms); civil society organisations (universities, NGOs, non-profits, foundations, activists, George Soros, etc.); and the media (the newspapers, and the commercial and government radio and TV broadcasters). The success of this whole operation has been dependent on the ability of each of these hundreds of agencies to hook into the archetypal paradigm of the heroic to achieve its revision of history, its dumbed-down dichotomies of right and wrong and its legitimisation of violent regime-change operations and military solutions.

For the Russians, the Ukraine conflict is a continuation of their WW2 fight with Nazism in which 27 million Russians died. Their actions are completely understandable. They are protecting the ethnic-Russian communities of Eastern Ukraine from the ethnic-cleansing operations of a violently anti-Russian and essentially fascist Ukrainian government that was established via a US-facilitated coup in 2014 (which cost the US more than 5 billion US Dollars to set up). Despite this, and despite having chosen to make its WW2 Nazi collaborators into national heroes, Ukraine is now being entirely funded and armed by the NATO countries. Although the very simple request, on the part of the Russians, for a neutral Ukraine, with a multicultural and federal system of governance to protect its ethnic-Russian population, was dismissed; the bullies of Ukraine and the collective West have once again managed to present themselves as noble and heroic. The heroic and simplistic, truth-denying good-and-evil propaganda rhetoric has been mostly taken as truth by the populations of the NATO countries – while the ex-colonial countries of the developing world have been looking on in astonishment and generally refusing to get involved.

Few in the heroic and unreflective collective West seem capable of considering that we are ‘the baddies’ in this instance, so we all go along with the agenda of the Western arms industries and those who are desperately trying to prevent the emergence of a sane multipolar world that might challenge US hegemony. Those presenting the actual reality of what is happening are regarded as an insignificant minority of ‘contrarians’, ‘Putin apologists’, ‘Kremlin stooges’, and ‘useful idiots’, but I find myself to be in very good company in this regard. Indeed there are enormous number of good-hearted, objective, knowledgable, independent-minded, and independently-funded people baring witness to this truth, they are just not being acknowledged by the legacy media in the NATO countries. Indeed, somewhat absurdly, they are continuously smeared and accused of being part of a coordinated Russian disinformation operation – in reality they simply share a commitment to the truth, and a critical perspective on the activities of the NATO war machine.

The following is a list of a few of the acclaimed and award-winning writers, commentators, academics, and journalists who see the current exacerbation of the Ukraine conflict as a completely predictable, and even inevitable, given the decades of extreme provocation by the US and NATO that preceded it:

 

 

Of course, a large number of analysts holding a particular view of history does not, in itself, make it true. The point that I am unfortunately needing to make is that the heroic mindset that pervades our culture is not inherently interested in the objective truth – only in a description of reality that provides justification for heroic self-identification with the ‘good’ and condemnation of a chosen enemy as ‘bad’. Current mainstream journalism, being informed by this mindset, cannot serve as a source of truth. The listing above is of people who, in my view, seem to have been conscious enough to renounce this primitive impulse, and have instead sought to raise awareness of it, and to advocate for peace and reconciliation in Ukraine, and an end to the irrational Russia-hatred, and to the manipulation by neocon power-brokers in the White House, who are intent on weakening Russia (and importantly, simultaneously weakening the Euro’s threat to the precarious US dollar) at whatever horrific cost in death and destruction to the Ukrainians themselves.

Most Buddhists hold that there is such a thing as objective truth, but this awareness is undermined because of a dysfunction that is similar because it is due to the predominance of the same heroic archetype. It may be observed that Western Buddhists who are strong adherents to the ‘self-development’ perspective, tend to hold to the unfortunate idea that there is a particular orthodox, or canonical, description of the Dharma and of reality – a particular narrative that must to be authoritatively established so that it can dominate the discourse within the Sangha and therefore bring harmony, unity and shared purpose. This is heroic hubris of course. The truth of which the Buddha spoke, can ultimately only be found ‘within’ – and though direct enquiry into the flawed nature of our processes of cognition and perception. Moreover, truth can only be found by an openness of mind that is willing always to go beyond the prejudices of the egoic mind – including the conceptual definitions of the Dharma that the institutions of the Buddhist tradition present us with.

I shall be returning to this theme in Part 2 of this article. There is a very dark and dangerous archetypal pattern currently at play in Western culture, which is related to that movement in the Western thought-frame which philosophers call post-modernism – a variation on the heroic that has its own very particular dysfunction. This aspect of the zeitgeist is very difficult to describe, but our recognition of it is fundamental if we are to understand how Western practitioners of Buddhism might engage creatively with the problems of our age – Sanghas are not immune to being dragged along by this cultural trend. If we were to make an attempt at a description of this spirit of our times, we could say that although populations in the West are better educated than in previous centuries, the lively debate that we see – the relentless all-pervasive public debate – is not directed towards discerning the truth. While this public discourse might appear at first to be a fight for the truth – a genuine exploration through a dialectic process – in fact it is not. This is not the noble “mental fight” of which William Blake spoke in his poetry. Rather it is a heroic fight – a dirty ignoble brawl between adversarial egos that is psychologically heroic but in the worst sense of the term – an assertion of competing subjective narratives, in which, very often, none of the participants are at all interested in truth – only in establishing the dominant narrative. What at first appears as public discourse within the mature and well-educated culture of modern democratic nation-states is in fact primitive, tribal, crude and unconscious – and massively distorted by the manipulations of the powerful.

The people that I have listed above may not be entirely immune to the cultural process of post-modernism’s post-truth world, but I believe they display the characteristic of being committed to the truth in the way that mainstream journalists and commentators generally are not. First on that list, I placed the late John Pilger, an Australian war journalist who adopted the United Kingdom as his home. Pilger distinguished himself through his exhaustive study and documentation of the phenomenon of US propaganda and censorship operations from the Vietnam War onwards. He is an exemplar of a tradition of anti-war journalism, that I regard as expressing the essential Buddhist values of truth and non-violence. His contribution was enormous and he shall be missed, mourned and remembered fondly. There is poignancy in the fact that he died on 30 December 2023, when the horrific and entirely unnecessary Ukraine conflict had been raging as a full US proxy-war for nearly two years. So, in his last months of life he found himself helplessly witnessing not just perhaps the worst US military adventure since Vietnam, but the strange aberration and abject journalistic failure that has been UK news coverage of that war. He stated several times in interviews during the year before his death, that in all his years as a war journalist he had never seen a propaganda and censorship operation as comprehensive and as effective as the Ukraine-NATO operation associated with the current Ukraine conflict.

The lack of any ability on the part of the European governments to take an independent moral stand, or even to show appropriate democratic responsibility and national self-interest, is so astonishing, that we are forced to see this as symptomatic of the basic psychological blindness of the egoic mind when the archetype of the heroic is evoked – but with the extra blindness and subjectivity that post-modernism brings. Because the NATO bureaucrats can so easily hook into such a fundamentally unconscious and divisive archetypal structure, their simplistic ‘good’ and ‘evil’ narratives serve to deceive us every time – and few are able to see the underlying geopolitical manipulations, the commercial interests, and the monstrous democratic dysfunction that allows a continuous massive flow of arms corporation money into the campaign funds of US Congressmen. The destruction, by Ukraine’s NATO allies, of the Nordsteam Gas Pipeline, is a symbol of the bizarre willingness of the Europeans to sacrifice their prosperity for the archaic US-NATO construct of unity against Russia – a Cold War fantasy violently imposed on a Europe whose future prosperity depends on having the Russian Federation as a friend and economic trading partner, and not as a military enemy in a re-established Cold War.

The NATO bureaucrats are masters of an anti-democratic rhetoric dressed up in notions of heroism, protection, democracy, and friendship, while simultaneously expressing a systematic denial of history, international law, and the basic ethics of self-determination, national sovereignty, and the preservation of the security of all parties by the practice of respect and mutuality in international diplomacy – indeed they appear to live their lives immersed in heroic narratives that are in equal parts dishonest and delusional. Their jobs are dependent on their ability to maintain the heroic masquerade and the bogus ‘enemy images’ that justify the existence of their organisation – an organisation that, in reality, only exists to allow the US to manipulate European politics, and to deal with the problems that its existence creates.

This sort of deep incongruity, due to outright lies and manipulation of the narrative, has been seen everywhere in human history, but it appears to be becoming more prevalent and more obvious in the modern world now that so many agencies are involved. This is partly because the technological propaganda resources available to the powerful are now so great – even though the internet is simultaneously allowing small independant channels to provide truthful reporting. For me, there is clearly a deeper dimension to this apparent ethical bankruptcy in Western culture, to do with the way the mass of people have lost the ‘other-power’ ability to look within for ethical guidance and cognitive-perceptual integrity. This is probably not surprising – even long-term students of Buddhism often fail to recognise that the deep transformation of our perceptual clarity and our ethical sensibility that is implied by the Buddha’s Middle Way is not achieved without a real relationship with the ‘other-power’ dimension that I have been calling the dharmic reality.

The phenomena of ethical blindness and empathy failure are complex, and multidimensional. There are several dimensions of the egoic mind involved in this distortion of reality. Quite apart from the distortions of conceptualisation and evaluation, there is a failure to perceive accurately – a failure to gather information in a discerning way, and a failure to recognise the systemic forces that are generating misinformation and preventing truthful narratives from circulating. The Buddha spoke of these distortions within the egoic mind and within social psychology, in terms of the five cognitive-perceptual skandhas, which I shall be addressing in detail in a future chapter. Of these, there are two skandha categories that find most overt expression in the mentality of the heroic. These are, firstly, the rūpa skandha, which generates that heroic narrative description of the world which identifies itself as ‘good’, while condemning external others as ‘bad’ and generating the kleshas of dvesha, or ‘hatred’. The Buddhist tradition depicts this dynamic in the archetypal imagery of the Hell Realms, where there are two classes of beings – the persecutors and the persecuted.

When the egoic mind is seen though and its karmic momentum is released, the rūpa skandha is transformed. Our thinking mind then functions in completely different way – and the Buddhist tradition calls this new mode of bright intelligence and mental objectivity, the Mirror-Like Wisdom. There is much that could be said about the Mirror-Like Wisdom. Just as the images in a mirror do not stick to its surface, so the mind of the Mirror-Like Wisdom uses concepts without identification – without attachment to them, and therefore with an objectivity that is not otherwise possible, and in complete awareness of the inherent limitations of those conceptualisations. In the context of our present reflection on the self-power / other-power dichotomy, we can also see the Middle Way as the ability to see ‘the other side’ – to consider the opposite view; to consider in what ways the opposite perspective might contain a necessary truth without which we cannot truly progress. This for me is a key aspect of a non-heroic intelligence – indeed, without it we can get stuck in either the ‘self-power’, or the ‘other-power’ view, and we go to one extreme or the other. So, the Mirror-Like Wisdom is a stance of Equanimity – while it may manifest as a force of clarity, it does not take a fixed position intellectually. This capacity to ‘see both sides’ is a foundational principle for our practice of the Middle Way.

 

 

Secondly, and perhaps even more obviously, there is the volitional samskāras skandha, the personal-will energy which attacks and destroys in its quest for domination – symbolised in the ‘war god’ imagery of the archetypal asuras of Indian tradition. I shall be returning to the samskāras skandha in Part 2 of this essay. Until we have begun to make conscious the self-serving and defensive function of these skandhas, we are living our lives immersed in the delusional world of the heroic myth – a cartoonish world of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, peopled by noble, one-dimensional heroes, and stereotypical moustache-twirling villains.

I shall be saying much more about the asura archetype – the violent imagery of the heroic ‘war gods’ of ancient India – without, which the Buddha’s critique of the heroic cannot be fully understood. I have already spoken about the wisdom of Indian culture’s deeply ambivalent relationship with its war gods, and of the great collective psychological danger that comes from our lack of this critical sensibility within Western culture. In the West, we are naive about the power of our heroic war gods to shape our personal psychology and our culture. Buddhism, having arisen within the collective unconscious of ancient India holds a different perspective. Buddhism’s ‘Devil’ figure is a powerful asura king called Mara. I regard this Indian archetypal perspective as precious. I believe it offers us a protective perspective that highlights the Shadow of the heroic, and potentially serves as a doorway into a renewed ethical sensibility for the modern West.

When we become attuned to the major archetypes, we see them in society and culture and history, as well as in the psychology of individuals. The archetype of the heroic is everywhere. It is the universal archetype of the egoic will. It is the archetype that can always be guaranteed to set up a polarisation of consciousness against unconsciousness in the mind. It will always be evoked by the armies of professional propagandists in organisations like AUKUS and NATO; in the US and European foreign ministries; and by the numerous specialist public relations firms who are employed by those foreign ministries. Every manipulative politician and bad journalist instinctively evokes the heroic – as their main tool for creating Shadow projection and group cohesion around bogus pro-war narratives. Indeed, it seems that any time a Shadow dynamic or injustice within our own society might be revealed, an external enemy is found and our hostility toward that chosen enemy is mobilised.

I share these historical reflections because it is important that we recognise the way appeals to the heroic have always been used to ennoble societal processes that are far from noble. It is instructive to acknowledge that the greatest evils of human history have usually been framed in terms of the heroic. It is just a fact of social psychology that such appeals to the heroic can easily be used, by the powerful, to create an ennobling and supposedly ethical and compassionate narrative while simultaneously masking a primitive motivation that is selfish, or nationalistic, or driven by a pursuit of power. Our governments, our newspapers, and our television news channels do this every day. This is not especially malevolent and conspiratorial – this is just what they do, given the nature of the egoic mind, and of the group dynamics and social identifications that the egoic mind creates.

So, it is not just the archetypal compulsion to be on the side of the ‘good’ in the judgmental dynamic of good-versus-evil that is at play when the archetype of the hero is evoked – there is also the archetypal need for ‘self-surrender’. If this longing for an experience of ‘other-power’ cannot find expression through an authentic individuality-affirming surrender to the dharmic ‘other-power’ – a surrender that leads to ethics and wisdom – it will instead find expression in willing surrender of our individuality through emersion in the group; through surrender to the group identity; and through sacrifice our own discernment, and adoption of the group’s values and beliefs. This primitive and dysfunctional way of experiencing a crude form of ‘other-power’ is all part of the unacknowledged Shadow of that Dharmic perspective which exclusively preferences a heroic ‘self-development’ perspective and de-values the real dharmic ‘other-power’. This is a foundational understanding. As Western Buddhists trying to practice the Dharma in a post-modern world, we cannot afford to put our trust in a heroic moral will and in received opinions about right and wrong. We must balance the ‘self-power’ perspective with a true ‘other-power’ perspective, by developing a deep familiarity with, and deep acknowledgement of, the dharmic reality – with its potential for reconciliation, healing, Integration, Positive Emotion, and a true ethical sensibility.

Please click the link below (or here) for the second part of this essay, and for more reflections on what is probably the single most important issue facing Western practitioners of Buddhism – and quite possibly the most important issue facing the people of the world, at this critical and dangerous point in history.

To read Part 2 of ‘Self-Power’, ‘Other-Power’ and Beyond click here.

 

William Parker 2024

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