The great philosophical psychologist, Carl Jung went beyond Freud’s shallow personal subconscious (a repository of repressed mental contents), to what he called the “collective unconscious” which took in the whole of the psyche, and went far beyond the individual intellect.
Jung believed that nothing in the cosmos is incapable of psychological inclusion given the necessary insight and balanced vision. Thus he sometimes seemed to scorn the notion of the metaphysical with its transcendental exclusivity, a notable characteristic of many in the psychotherapy movement of his day. The balance then between what is psychological and what is metaphysical is dangerously subject to all the vagaries of definition, making comparisons between viewpoints all the more perilous.
The Japanese introducer of Zen to the West, Dr D T Suzuki, had this to say on the matter: “The idea is to express the unconscious working of the mind, but this unconscious is not to be interpreted psychologically, but on the spiritual plane where all ‘traces’ of discursive or analytical understanding vanish.”
Compare this with Jung’s: “One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”
How would it reveal itself? Is the viewpoint arising from the non-working of the senses (which includes “thinking” in Buddhism) in the state called Nirvana to be called psychological?
The difference here is no-difference. Suzuki uses “psychological” to describe objects of rational thinking — all else, by implication, is metaphysical. Jung, however, takes a Western approach and calls anything capable of being experienced, even outside the normal thought processes, psychological. Of course, anything which cannot be experienced is of no concern to us, since we could not possibly ever know of its existence. This is not the case with the Buddhist “Unborn mind” which is clearly experienced from moment to moment by those attuned to it, nor indeed with nirvanic experiences.
Jung uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and transcendental. Suzuki draws a line at the limits of the intellect, thus creating an enormous “spiritual” domain. Here the divisive nature of words manufactures an East/West chasm that does not really exist. Both are constantly aware of the non-dual totality of things.
John Evans
