#Buddha | Mandala of Love

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Archetypes

This is Post 4 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

Carl Jung was a psychiatrist, and he started his professional life working in large psychiatric institutions. He was a student of the neurologist Sigmund Freud who was developing his psychoanalytic method of treatment at that time. Jung had a close friendship with Freud, but his voracious appetite for understanding lead him to his own distinctive style of psychological thinking, which is of great importance for the modern world. His Analytical Psychology was distinguished two powerful concepts: the archetypes; and the collective unconscious.

Because of his pragmatism and alignment with the emerging scientific materialism in medicine, Freud’s more reductive approach was subsequently more widely adopted during the 20th Century. Jung was altogether more ambitious. It is as if he was writing for the 21st Century – and specifically setting himself against both the scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism of the 20th Century. His perspective was, I believe, aiming to be much more comprehensive and – despite his careful efforts to avoid metaphysical speculation – more spiritual.

Jung the Scientist of the Inner World

While Jung was in some ways actually more rigorously scientific and forward looking than Freud, he was also looking back to the roots of psychology in the literature, mythology and psychological reflections of the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. His archetypes can be thought of as the eternal principles at work in human psychology, and also as the collective psychological forces at work in nations and human groups – forces that the ancients projected onto their gods. Continue reading

April 28, 2017

Non-Duality – Buddha, Jesus, and Plato

This is Post 4 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The unity of Consciousness and that which arises in Consciousness, is often spoken of in terms of non-duality or oneness, but what we actually experience in the self-inquiry experience, might better be characterised as a relational unity. Each of the great spiritual teachers have found different ways of pointing to this fundamental unity or oneness. When Jesus said “I and the Father are One” he was expressing this truth in the context of Jewish tradition. Similarly, the Buddha challenged us to notice that the conventionally assumed atman or soul in Hindu tradition cannot be located, and is actually ‘empty’ of self-nature. Now Quantum Physics is pointing to the same fundamentally unitary reality in which everything arises.

There is great practical psychological value for each one of us in trying to find our own experiential way into the actual perceptual reality behind these confusing and challenging ideas. For me, the core idea experientially behind these teachings, is that we are invited to acknowledge Consciousness – that which is generally overlooked in the perceptual process – and are invited to notice the ethical and relational qualities that are inherent in Consciousness, and to recognise that our assumed state of absolute separateness is a superficial phenomena – one that is denied, or at least relativised, by our more fundamental unity and connectedness on the level of Consciousness.

Plato’s Cave – an Allegorical Description of Consciousness

The unconscious and habitual tendency, which characterises ordinary egoic awareness, is such that we fail to acknowledge Consciousness. All our senses are directed almost exclusively towards objects. In regard to our sense of sight for example, we look ‘forward’ – with our attention solely on the object of our awareness – and do not acknowledge the Consciousness that is ‘seeing’. When we look forward in this way (without reference to what is looking) our perception is always limited and – paradoxically – can accurately be described as ’subjective’.

It is only when we allow ourselves to draw back and include Consciousness in our experiencing, that we become capable of perceiving reality as it is – that is, objectively. This way of experiencing, where we draw our attention back into the observing Consciousness, so as to include, or even give primacy to, the observing Consciousness in the perceptual relationship, is what the Buddhist tradition has come to refer to as Mindfulness. Continue reading

April 24, 2017

A ‘Mandala of Love’ approach to Meditation

This the first post in my ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Meditation is very easy to do, and provides enormous benefits, when practised correctly. Unfortunately however, it is difficult to teach, and difficult to learn. Indeed meditation is very difficult to conceptualise at all.

It is not surprising therefore, that meditation is, in general, very poorly taught. I originally learned about meditation in a Buddhist context in my early twenties, and often struggled with the practices that I had been given. I had many powerful and deeply affecting meditation experiences however, which encouraged me to keep practising, but as I look back on that time, I very much wish someone had explained to me the things that I know now – the things which I shall be sharing, as best I can, in the articles in this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

At that time, I applied myself primarily to the meditations taught by the spiritual tradition in which I was living and working, but because I found the prescribed practices so difficult and so unsatisfying, I also occasionally experimented with several entirely different approaches, which were essentially contemplations on the Mandala of the Five Buddhas, on Carl Jung’s Four Functions of Consciousness, and on the descriptions of our energetic anatomy from Tibetan Buddhist tradition. That period of experimentation and exploration laid the foundations for the approach I have adopted as I have recently returned to daily meditation practice in my late fifties. Continue reading

April 16, 2017