MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Jung
It has seemed advisable to insist in some detail on these differentiations between the double darkness and the two moons so as to forestall any temptation that a Western reader might feel to identify the Buddhist Depth Consciousness with Jung's hypothetical collective unconscious, which is a psychological caricature of the Metaphysical Alaya-vijnana; for the Buddhist Mind is universal, not collective, and conscious, not unconscious. Jung's misinterpretations of Oriental scriptures result from Procrustean efforts to fit them to his own 'carefully nurtured system of ambiguities' to quote Marco Pallis's apt phrase, in an attempt to reduce the spiritual to the psychological, or worse, psychopathological.
Jung's tripartite division of the psyche into an ego-consciousness, a personal unconscious, and a collective unconscious resembles a cosmology with an earth and two levels of hell, but no heaven, the depths without the heights. Although, as Heraclitus held, the Way up and the Way down may lie along the same vertical Axis Mundi, their directions are diametrically opposed. For those who fail to distinguish between them and mistake the descensus Averni for the Olympian apotheosis, there may well be a way down but no way up again. So Jung's subrational 'archetypes' are not to be confused with the Metaphysical Archetypes, the supernal principles and powers, for they are merely their infernal and fragmented distortions reflected in the dark lower waters of a disturbed psyche. Although investigated only from within the individual patient, the contents of his 'unconscious' are said to be collective, which implies that they must have entered it at some remote period from social experiences in the outside world. Yet at the same time as they are described as such 'residues', it is also claimed that they are 'primordial'! No wonder that Owen Barfield was prompted to his witty enquiry: 'Just how primordial can a residue be?'