The Buddhist Unconscious (Alaya-vijnana) and Jung’s Collective Unconscious: What Does It Mean to be Liberated from the Self?
Author: Mr. Purrington Publisher: Carl Jung Depth Psychology Publish Date:2020-7-16 Review Date: Status:⌛️
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I aim to expand and clarify the meaning of the collective unconscious by drawing not only on Jung’s ideas about it, but on the much more ancient and comprehensive model of a collective unconscious from Yogacara Buddhism that originated and developed in the third to the fifth centuries in India
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truth/reality arises and passes away, moment by moment, in nano-second units of conscious action called cittas.
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The act of consciousness is immediate awareness that comes into being at the membrane between subjectivity and objectivity. A citta is a discrete instance of conscious activity that we can imagine as a kind of disturbance or disruption that signals contact between a perceiving “subject” and an “object.”
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There are some unprogrammed cittas (fractions of a second) that arise with each new perception and if we can become conscious of them, we reach a liberation from past and future. If we can actualize this liberation, we are also free from what we regard as time and space, even though we are still on the plane of mundane existence.
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As Buddhism develops over time, two kinds of discourses evolve with its practices. One discourse involves conventional truths that help us to function as persons in the everyday world. For example, our collective mental health dictates that we perceive the sky as “above” and the ground as “below,” distinguish past and future, and share a sense of self as “in here” while the world is “out there.”
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Much of the deeper Buddhist teachings address, on the other hand, ultimate truth that disavows the reality of any and all thingness of subject, object, in-here, out-there, sky and ground. This dharma shows exactly how self/other, life/death, good/bad and other existential opposites can never be separated because they are co-creating each other.
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In the Buddha’s description of his own awakening (e.g., Thanissaro, 2011), he makes clear the way karma is created. He penetrates the reality of all of his own karma and becomes a witness to its many different forms (animal, human, deity). He also sees how collective existences are shaped hrough habit and adaptation.
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He also sees how collective existences are shaped hrough habit and adaptation. In his ultimate awakening, the Buddha witnesses the arising and passing away of the entire cosmos and how it is connected to karma through a principle called “dependent arising.” This principle illustrates how we are always embedded within a dynamic field of self/world and subject/object. We arise within this field, never apart from it.
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And yet, from the perspective of conventional reality, individuals are acting for themselves and move from perception into action, from past into the future. Such movement is also undergirded by fixed mental dispositions – called sanskaras in Sanskrit – that are remarkably similar to Jung’s archetype: deep mental structures that motivate us to create repetitive templates in our feelings, thoughts, and actions. An individual “self” is such a template.
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Self and world arise together and are co-created at the membrane of their contact. The reason we need to contemplate our unreal self is that we are always creating consequences through our actions and intentions.
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The ways in which we perceive, speak, and act impact our on-going surroundings through influences we cannot even fathom. These karmic implications have special significance in our primary human relationships (the ones that take place on an on-going basis in our families, communities, and partnerships) in which the consequences of our speech and actions can readily create emotional and psychological patterns that persist over generations, always shaping or molding the future.
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Karmic implications play out habitually in public and social realms, as well, in which we fixate on certain identity meanings and create consequence from these fixations.
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But if each individual’s world (the perceptual domain of an organism that has come about through recurrent interaction with natural and social environments) is largely determined by previous intentional actions in this and other lifetimes, then how do our worlds have anything at all in common? What leads to coherence between individuals’ experiences of self/world? In a sense, the early Buddhist teachings provoke the question: If awareness occurs only through momentary conscious individual perception, how can we experience a consensual world? Eventually a new model of mind develops to respond to this question, one which finally produces a theory of a collective unconscious, remarkably similar to Jung’s.
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The new model from Yogacara Buddhism, beginning in roughly third century India, posits a substrate consciousness that consists of predispositions that condition our collective conceptual and linguistic images, names, and categories of thought. This substrate evolves through multiple lifetimes, is sensitive to cultural and biological influences, and also arises in a moment-to-moment way, mixed with all of our perceptions. This is also the consciousness that transcends the “death” of the body. It is called alaya-vijnana – a term that means roughly “home consciousness” or “storehouse consciousness. “
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The six traditional modes of awareness (five senses plus mental functions) now do not arise solely within subject-object contact, but now they are shaped or supported by this alaya awareness. Sensory cognitive awareness is no longer simply dependent on the present moment, but is influenced by subliminal predispositions, collective images, and linguistic categories that flow from the karmic past for each organism.
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This streaming substrate consciousness, of which we are typically unaware, is both an intentional and active consciousness, and can be witnessed consciously.
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As Waldron (2006) writes: Alaya-vijnana is said to be accompanied by the same five ‘mental factors’ that accompany every other moment of mind (citta) in the Yogacara tradition: attention, sensation, feeling, perception, and intention. (90) And so, when we perceive our embodiment and world, we depend on subtle conditioning factors that promote “an outward perception of the receptacle world whose aspects are indistinct” (95).
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As long as we remain constrained by the unconscious schemas or archetypes (to use Jung’s language) that underlie ordinary perceptions and cognitions, we will be motivated to experience “I am” inside “this body” while “others” and the “world” are outside.
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And this disposition carries many emotional marks and psychological meanings that compel us to create more consequential actions that will keep us entrenched in a cyclical habituated set of identities. The view “I am” is the afflictive root of our karma and until we “pull it up” we will be captured, as Jung says, by the ten thousand things and the collective unconscious.
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Waldron (2006) notes that Jung writes about unconscious process that sounds remarkably similar to the Yogacara model of the unconscious: Seemingly similar, Jung also claims that unconscious processes replicate conscious ones in that they include ‘perception, thinking, feeling, volition, and intention just as though a subject were present’ (90).
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In Waldron’s description of Jung, Jung is referring to the characteristics of psychological complexes, sub-personalities that organize the personal unconscious, and not to the archetypes that organize the collective unconscious. Jung’s later theory of the collective unconscious does not have even a whiff of the attribution of subjectivity, but is a model of unconscious forces or predispositions. For example, Jung ([1955]1977) writes of archetype: This term is [meant to denote] an inherited mode of psychic functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a ‘pattern of behavior.’ This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology. (518)
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Jung sees archetypes as triggered by “situational patterns” where they motivate and compel the activation and development, within the individual, of habitual complexes or fixed configurations of affect, image, idea, and action that cause us to see-hear-feel self and others in highly repetitive and driven ways.
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Unconscious archetypes are the motivating forces that predispose the organization of personality, defenses, and reactivity. These complexes, like our karma, can carry over unconsciously from generation to generation in family life so that individuals are entirely unaware of how and why they may repeatedly carry out traumatic enactments, through the collective unconscious, from previous generations.