#Spiritual

The Brahmavihāras – the Soul’s Moral Compass

This is Post 13 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

When we look within, we find that Consciousness, the ultimate nature of the human mind, appears to be structured like a mandala – like a compass rose. And at each of the directions of this inner compass are ethical principles that are inherent in the nature of Consciousness. In the last few posts, I have been starting to explore one cultural form of this archetypal mandala structure – an ancient pre-Buddhist formulation called the four brahmavihāras – the four ‘abodes of Brahma’, sometimes called the four immeasurables.

Meditation as a Mandala-Cycle

Traditionally in the Indian and Himalayan countries our circumambulation of, or progression around, the mandala, follows the path of the sun in the northern hemisphere, so we enter the mandala in the east, which is associated with sunrise; then move round clockwise to the south, which is associated with mid-day; then move round clockwise again to the west, which is associated with sunset; then move round clockwise again to the north, which is associated with midnight; and then return to the east point and the sunrise once again. I shall be adopting this traditional order as I go deeper into the four brahmavihāras in the future articles is this series over the coming weeks. When we have a full understanding of all four brahmavihāras there is great value in practicing all four in sequence, as a mandala-cycle. Continue reading

June 21, 2017

The Ethical and Relational Nature of Consciousness

This is Post 12 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

Consciousness is like the space we move through – it is easy to go through life completely unaware of it. And even though it is always there when we look for it, its nature can be difficult to grasp. If we are setting out to systematically familiarise ourselves with the ultimate nature of mind, the four brahmavihāras provide us with an extremely good, and relatively simple framework for engaging in this exploration – one that highlights the inherently ethical and relational nature of Consciousness. They also offer us four very attractive and relatively easy ways of moving out of ordinary egoic consciousness into states of alignment and healing.

The Four Mahabrahmavihāras

In Mahayana Buddhist tradition, reflection on the brahmavihāras brought a development to the early Buddhist approach to that teaching, which is of enormous practical and philosophical significance for those who wish to use the brahmavihāras as a framework for meditation and self-inquiry, and I would like to share it here.

Essentially, the understanding arose that it is helpful to see each one of the brahmavihāras as having both a personal, egoic and conditional aspect, and a transpersonal, or archetypal, or unconditional aspect – even though these two aspects can never be completely separated. The implication was that the most effective way to connect with the brahmavihāras is by opening ourselves to the transpersonal aspect of each one – and allowing the energies of each one to flow through us.

For example mettā, or Loving-Kindness came to be seen as a reflection, in personal felt experience, of mahamettā, or Great Loving-Kindness, which is unconditional, archetypal and transpersonal – an aspect of the field of Consciousness in which we rest. Each of the personally experienced brahmavihāras has a corresponding archetypal source in Consciousness – a mahabrahmavihāra. Continue reading

June 12, 2017

Mettā – Consciousness as Loving-Kindness

This is Post 11 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

It is understandable that mettā, or Loving-Kindness, would be the best understood of the four brahmavihāras. It is the one which has its own short recorded discourse in the Pali Cannon of early Buddhist tradition, but more importantly, it is the one which most resonates with our experience in ordinary life. Mettā extends our ordinary notions of love to express an attitude of unconditionally valuing everything in our experience, and unconditionally valuing all of the people in our world. People who practice the mettābhāvanā meditation practice, would generally describe mettā as being characterised by a feeling or attitude of warmth, kindness, care, and of love – in the sense of a deep valuing and well-wishing. The most common translation of mettā is Loving Kindness, but it includes qualities of ‘unconditional love’, ‘unconditional valuing’, and ‘unconditional acceptance’.

The mettābhāvanā practice is often felt by practitioners to be powerfully transformative – a powerful support to psychological integration, and to social interaction. Because mettā is that attitude of Consciousness, which unconditionally values and accepts our experience, it powerfully transforms the evaluative, or ‘Feeling’ function of the human mind. In ordinary egoic consciousness, the evaluative, or ‘Feeling’, function discerns that which is of value to us by attending to the internal flow of pleasant and unpleasant feeling states that are our emotional guidance system throughout life.

This discernment between that which is of value to us and that which is not, may be conscious or unconscious, and plays a very important role in the egoic construction of identity, and in the establishment of the defensive threshold between egoic feeling, which we are happy to identify with, and the feeling aspect of the unconscious – emotional content of the mind that we would rather not feel, or that which we would rather not remember, or that which we would rather not recognise as an aspect of ourselves.

Mettā – Healing and Evolving the Emotional Body

In regard to how this Feeling aspect of the personal unconscious is experienced, there is a useful notion in esoteric Buddhism and other spiritual traditions – the Emotional Body. In my view, the idea that we have a psycho-spiritual anatomy made up of subtle energy bodies and ‘chakra’ points or areas, where the energetic state of the subtle bodies is most keenly felt, is a very useful one – and is one that fits the experience of myself and other meditators. I am in general very critical of the way this ‘somatic’ anatomy is described, and shall be attempting to bring some clarity to this area ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Continue reading

June 6, 2017

The Four Brahmavihāras – Four Attitudes of Consciousness

This is Post 10 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

One of the Buddha’s respectful borrowings from the earlier spiritual traditions of ancient India, was the four brahmavihāras (Sanskrit). I regard this teaching as fundamental to our understanding of meditation, and I shall be devoting a long series of posts to exploring it. In my view, the four brahmavihāras are not only essential for understanding and practising meditation – they are essential for understanding life.

As a starting point we can say that the four brahmavihāras are very refined and positive mental-emotional states associated with the divine in Indian tradition. I hope to show, in the course of these articles, that it is important to think of the four brahmavihāras as more than this. They are better thought of as the characteristic mental-emotional attitudes of Consciousness, or qualities of Consciousness – ethical and relational attitudes, not merely mental states. Correctly conceptualised they constitute a universal moral compass that is inherent in Consciousness, and if they were correctly and widely understood in this way they could change the way humanity sees itself, and change the course of history. The importance of this particular ancient description of the divine cannot be overstated. The four brahmavihāras are probably one of the most refined expressions of the mandala archetype, and also one of the most perfect and most illuminating expressions of Jung’s four functions of Consciousness, in the whole of human history.

Brahma – An Archetypal Image of Consciousness

In Indian spiritual tradition, the Sanskrit word Brahman denotes the absolute divine, and the god Brahma is the deity who personifies that ultimate reality – and who occupies the highest place in cosmic order of the ancient Indian pantheon. He is held to be the creator of the universe in Hindu tradition, so he is very like the Judaeo-Christian Yahweh in that regard, but in other ways he is very different. Continue reading

May 24, 2017

Egoic consciousness – Divided against itself

This is Post 8 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

It is often claimed that meditation brings about psychological integration – that it helps us to become less scattered and more unified. This is certainly true, but I am hoping that it will be helpful for us if, in this article, I clarify the nature of the disintegration that is inherent in ordinary egoic consciousness, so that we can better understand why, ultimately, Consciousness itself is the only force that can bring about psychological integration. Clearly, the egoic will has a part to play, but the integration process that we speak of in spiritual and discourse is a ‘Middle Way’ in which the universal and the personal meet and are reconciled.

In the course of the development of psychology and psychotherapy practice during the 20th Century, an understanding was introduced that, while it was startlingly original at the time, also seems to be an absolutely obvious reality in everyday life. This was the idea of the Unconscious. The notion of the Unconscious has been conceptualised in detail in a variety of different ways, but the core idea is that the mind is structured in such a way that we all tend to have a variety of unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, sensations, intentions and memories, that are entirely incongruous with, and even opposite to, the contents of our conscious mind.

Egoic parts – Soul parts – Psychological parts

This tendency for the self to continuously divide against itself leads inevitably to, not a single self but a profusion of opposing pairs of psychological parts. I am not talking about Schizophrenia here, or Multiple Personality Disorder – rather I am referring to a commonplace psychological reality that we are all familiar with in ourselves and others. We are all familiar with internal psychological conflict, and our language reflects this. When we are trying to make a decision, we say “Part of me feels this, and part of me feels that”. When we use the personal will to deny a thought, or a feeling, or a desire, we usually have a “reaction”, and suddenly find ourselves identifying with a part of ourselves that we had previously suppressed. Continue reading

May 15, 2017

Egoic Consciousness and its Shadow

This is Post 8 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

Students of Carl Jung’s ideas will be aware that he associated the four physical elements (Earth, Water, Air, and Fire), and the four perceptual-psychological functions (Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition-Volition). These four perceptual-psychological functions are usually arranged as a mandala, like a compass rose, with the rational-discriminative functions of Feeling and Thinking forming an opposition across the horizontal axis at West and East; and the perceptual-creative functions of Intuition / Volition and Sensation forming an opposition in the vertical axis at North and South.

On a superficial level Sensation, Thinking, Feeling and Intuition-Volition are egoic functions – the four primary functions by which individuals know and relate to their experience, and construct their identity. Jung, however, named these the Four Functions of Consciousness. Fully aware that these four functions are, in essence, four aspects of the Divine, he presented a rich and compelling analysis of how the potential for Consciousness and self-realisation is, sadly, usually unrealised, and how the same four functions give rise instead, to the various styles of limited egoic consciousness, each with a particular style of unconsciousness that goes with it. Continue reading

May 11, 2017

Jung’s Phenomenology of the Soul

This is article No 7 in a series of early articles that I have called my ‘book blog’ series. These articles were originally written for incorporation into a book project which was to be called ‘Mandala of Love: Consciousness, Ethics and Society’, which I abandoned in favour of publishing on this website.

A prime expression of the mandala archetype, and a good way for us to embark upon an exploration of mandala imagery, is the arrangement of the four classical physical elements, Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, into a four-fold pattern, which resembles the four directions of the compass rose. In Western thought, Fire and Earth, are often found opposed as the north and south quadrants, while Water and Air are opposed in the western and eastern directions respectively. In this mandala of the physical elements, the unifying element, Ether, is often included. Ether, which symbolises the space of Consciousness in which the four classical physical elements arise, takes the central position as the quintessence.

Words are Symbols

Carl Jung had a very keen understanding of the way in which all language is symbolic – that all words are symbols. In particular, he understood that in the pre-modern world-view the concrete physical world was (and is) felt to be, not just symbolically, but actually, connected with inner psychological and spiritual principles. Hence the four elements, which we still find in belief systems around the world from North America to Tibet, are usually associated with ancient and deeply insightful systems of psychological and spiritual thought. In these systems of thought, physical elements are either associated with personality types, or have recognised symbolic associations with psychological and spiritual principles, or components of the creative process. Continue reading

May 8, 2017

Buddhas and Bodhisattvas – Archetypes of Consciousness

This is Post 6 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

In previous posts, I have spoken about our need for a psychology that gives us a language with which to talk about soul and spirit and Consciousness, and of my belief that we do not have to be scholars or psychotherapists trained in Carl Jung’s tradition, in order to make use of his powerful psychology of the archetypes, or archetypal psychology. The Mandala of the Five Buddhas, which was such an inspiration to Carl Jung, came out the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and I would like to talk briefly about that tradition before moving on to talk about the mandala archetype in more general terms.

The Mahayana – the Expansion of the Buddha’s Vision

The Mahayana or ‘Great Vehicle’ is the phase of development of Buddhism that emerged in the Indian subcontinent during the 1st Century BCE, and thereafter spread to most of the countries of Asia. Although the rich and refined culture of the Indian Mahayana was almost entirely destroyed by the invasions of India in the Middle Ages, the vestiges of it remain because it was translated, before its demise in India, into so many other Asian cultural forms – in Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Continue reading

May 6, 2017

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

The Cross and the Mandala

This is Post 3 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

The Mandala is an archetype – a universal symbol or pattern. Images that reflect this archetypal pattern are found in all cultures throughout history, and in the dreams and visions of humanity since the beginning of recorded history. For Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, the mandala was a symbol of the wholeness of the psyche and of the cosmos – even a symbol of God. The Cross, the symbol of Christianity, is the most prominent example of a mandala image in world history. For Jung, the life of Jesus was a profound spiritual mystery – one that preoccupied him for the whole of his life. For him, Jesus was a man who lived a mythic life; and the crucifixion of Jesus was, for Jung, both an historical event and a mythic mandala image. It was one of the most important parts of his life’s work, that humanity should better understand this great symbol. Indeed, he found the lack of understanding of that symbol, and of the person of Jesus, to be both tragic and dangerous for the future of humanity.

Carl Jung’s Mandala Archetype

Carl Jung passionately wanted to bring about a healing and a renewal of Christianity, so that it could meet the modern world with a new wisdom and integrity. His search for understanding of the mandala archetype played a key part in that quest. To understand the depth of Jung’s passion in this regard, it is important to understand that he was the son of a protestant pastor, and that he had witnessed, in the course of his childhood, his father’s loss of faith, a painful experience whose impact never left him. He was also painfully conscious by the end of his life that Christianity had failed to prevent a bloody revolution in Russia, two horrific world wars, the rise of modern fascism, the Holocaust, and the nuclear arms race of the cold war era. Continue reading

April 21, 2017