Status Updates From Psychology and the East

It is characteristic that supreme insight, illumination and hence the greatest possibility of attaining liberation, are vouchsafed during the actual process of dying

(...) period in his Bardo existence, symbolically described as an intermediate state of forty-nine days duration between death and rebirth.

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY ON "THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD"

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thödol, is a book of instructions for the dead and the dying.

The purpose of my commentary is to attempt to build a bridge of psychological understanding between the East and the West.

The Imitatio Christi has this disadvantage: in the long run we worship as a divine example a man who embodied the deepest meaning of life and then, out of sheer imitation, we forget to make real our own deepest meaning - self-realization.

The West lays stress on the human incarnation and even on the personality and historicity of Christ, whereas the East says: "without beginning, without end, without past, without future".

The TAO grows out of the individual.

In the Pauline Christ symbol the supreme religious experiences of West and East confront one another: Christ the sorrow-laden hero, and the Golden Flower that blooms in the purple hall of the city of jade. What contrast, what an unfathomable difference, what an abyss of history.

Should Meister Eckhart be accused of "psychologism" when he says "God must be born in the soul again and again"?

The epithet "psychologism" apllies only to the fool who thinks he has his soul in his pocket

My admiration for the great philosophers of the East is as genuine as my attitude towards their metaphysics is irreverent. I suspect them of being symbolical psychologists, to whom no greater wrong could be done than to take them literally

Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology.

Only by standing firmly on our own soil can we assimilate the spirit of the East

No one should blind himself to the fact that this necessity of giving due consideration to the unconscious runs violently counter to our western, and in particular Protestant, cult of consciousness.

The Amfortas wound and the Faustian split in the Germanic man are still not healed, his unconscious is still loaded with contents that must first be made conscious before he can be free of them

Chinese yoga philosophy is based upon this instinctive preparation for death as a goal.

When there is no consciousness of the difference between subject and object, an unconscious identity prevails.

By understanding the unconscious we free ourselves from its domination

And there can be no doubt that consciousness does originate in the unconscious

In view of these psychological facts, I have reserved the term "ANIMUS" strictly for women, because, to answer a famous question, MULIER NON HABET ANIMAM, SED ANIMUM.

ANIMA called P'o and written with the characters for "white" and "demon", that is "white ghost" belongs to the lower, earthbound, bodily soul, the YIN principle and is therefore feminine