There are alot of problems with the following, including expressing Karma as doctrine and ideology. But it shows level of appropriation and subsequent denigration by the socalled west.
Karma and Archetype: A Teleological Unfolding of Self
By Mark Greene, Ph.D.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
In synchronous step with the advent of a Western psychology of the unconscious, the past century has been witness to an enormous influx and integration of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. Evidence of this intellectual cross-pollination can be seen as early as 1875 in New York City with the founding of the Theosophical society, "a small but active international group of occultists who believed in reincarnation as the necessary path to the ultimate, inevitable purification of humanity" (Encarta). Modern Western science, too, with Planck's introduction of a quantum mechanics theory of sub-atomic particle movement in 1900 and Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905), although not directly influenced by Hinduism or Buddhism, began to describe our perceived notion of physical reality in terms much akin to the age-old Eastern concept of Maya which stipulates that "indeed everything (material) other than Brahman, the indescribable Absolute, is an illusion." In the later part of this century, the influence of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism upon popular Western culture in the form of music, television programming, and a surge of interest in Eastern martial arts is readily apparent.
Of all the ideology found in the rich panoply of Eastern religion, perhaps it is the doctrine of Karma which stands out as the most accessible and fascinating for the psyche of the Western individual. Implicit within the Westerner's understanding of Karma is that one's deeds do not go unnoticed and that, indeed, an individual will be either rewarded or punished for one's actions both in this lifetime and in subsequent incarnations. Perhaps the inculcation of the predominantly Christian doctrine of heaven and hell as after-life possibilities dependent upon our behavior on earth enables the psyche of the Western individual to successfully identify with this aspect of Karma called Ethicization, "the belief that good and bad acts lead to certain results in one life or several lives" (O'Flaherty, p. xi). In so imagining ourselves collectively as children of an Old Testament father capable of compassion and wrath, and then subsequently, as sheep under the loving eye of a pastor (manifest in Jesus of Nazareth), the western psyche readily responds to the Karmic doctrine by supposing someone is watching. Granted, such a perception may be the result of projecting a divine father complex upon the karmic law in order to reformulate the Eastern ordering of existence with Western archetypal images in order to more completely integrate it.
Of interest and primary concern in this paper are the actual roots of the Karmic doctrine and its subsequent integration into the modern Western psyche by way of its profound influence upon the theories and psychology of Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Implicit within the Karmic doctrine is the concept of accumulation; a synthesis of negative and positive actions which add up to a current balance of energy much like the funds available to us in a bank. How one manages to preserve, invest, or squander these funds over the course of one's lifetime is a personal decision. Nevertheless, one cannot spend what is not there. Thus, a coming to terms with predetermined limitations coupled with a concept of free will, in the broadest possible sense, form the two opposing tenants which comprise the single paradoxical law of Karma.
In picturing one's life or lifetimes laid out linearly left-to-right upon a timeline, it would appear that Karma, as a force, concerns itself primarily with the past and the immediate present. Our Karma unfolds and is created in the moment; its momentum progresses on a bearing from left to right, past to present. Jung, however, postulates that life is inherently teleological (telos: end, purpose; the fact or character attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose. Websters). Although Jung allows for the same left-to-right movement on the above described timeline, it is as if the motivating force he believes to be at work is one which attracts the individual towards a final end; it is a force based in the future which exerts its pull upon the individual as opposed to one which propels the individual from the past as implied in the Karmic model. In a description of life as teleological, Jung posits our progress as running to a goal:
Life is an energy-process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. In the long run everything that happens is, as it were, no more than the initial disturbance of a perpetual state of rest which forever attempts to re-establish itself. Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves. (Jung, CW 8: p. 798)
It would appear that Jung takes into account forces which both propel as well as attract the individual as evidenced by his use of the word "directed" in the above passage. Later, this paper will give some examples of how Jung's theory of the archetype accounts for the unconscious "directing" which occurs within the human psyche. In exploring the origins of the word karma, one finds that they can be traced to the Vedic sacrifice: At the most basic level, the Vedic tradition employed the term karman, from the Sanskrit root /kr ("to do"), to describe the "doing" of the sacrificial ritual. However, over the many centuries during which it represented India's "culturally hegemonous" system of belief and practice, the Vedic sacrifice developed into an entity of astounding complexity, and the "doing" of the sacrifice became more than a matter of simple action (Tull, p. 6).
Herman Tull argues that the Vedic sacrifice had as it purpose the invocation of a microcosmic world order, one wherein the laws of the greater cosmos were mirrored and the gods propitiated by a controlled act of death. The Purusasukta, one of the books of the Rgveda, describes the creation of the cosmos by the divinity Purusa in two distinct phases. In the first, he is "spread asunder in all directions, to what eats and does not eat" (Rgveda 10.94.4 qtd. in Tull). Since the cosmos are still in a state of primordial undifferentiation, this spreading of the god Purusa in all directions establishes "him as the stuff or materia prima of creation" (Tull, p. 51). In the second phase of creation, Purusa's distributed essence brings forth the cosmos as manifest in the concrete forms of earth, sun, moon, and humankind. Central to this story is the theme of sacrifice as necessary for creation. In this sense, the supreme act of creation can occur only by way of the supreme act of sacrifice of the creator's body. "The form of this sacrifice is dismemberment" (Rgveda 10.90.11, quoted in Tull). "Purusa's body represents the whole of the undifferentiated cosmos; to bring forth the manifest cosmos, with its several constituents, this whole must be broken up into distinct parts" (Tull, p. 51). And so, upon the fire altar of the sacrifice (Agnicayana), a liminal space is created wherein the performer of the ritual substitutes an offering to be sacrificed in exchange for his ultimate sacrifice which will eventually occur in the burning of his own body on the funeral pyre. In exchange for the controlled act of destruction manifest in the sacrifce, this act which "purports to force access to the other world" expects a response in the form of life, "or in simple terms, one must sacrifice a cow in order to obtain cows" (Heesterman quoted in Tull). It can be said that the Vedic sacrifice itself, the "doing" of the sacrifice, reflects and reinforces the idea that in something dying, something new will be born. At the time of his death, the sacrificer moves into a the macrocosmic sphere and thus transcends the symbolism of the ritual by actually becoming a part of the cosmos. His death and implied rebirth take their form from the structure of the cosmos mirrored in the microcosm of the ritual which he has dutifully performed throughout his life. No longer symbolic, the soul is now an active player in the cosmic dance. In assessing these origins of the Karmic doctrine it becomes evident that to the Eastern psyche life is but an unfolding of a momentum within which we as souls have the fortune to partake. In recognizing creation itself as the result of a selfless act of sacrifice it is fitting to acknowledge that "indeed one becomes good by good action, bad by bad action (Brhadaranyak Upanisad 3.2.13 quoted in Tull). It is left to each individual to assist in the creation of the cosmos by performing good deeds, or at least, living one's life to the fullest by returning to the sacrificial fire what was given to all of us at the moment of creation.
The reader perhaps cannot help but notice doctrinal similarities between the Vedic origin of Karma and that of the Christian archetype. In both, a supreme sacrifice is made by a divinity who's death provides humankind with life. In the case of the West, redemption from evil is manifest as life everlasting as a sort of final destination, one awaiting the believer who confesses his sins and acknowledges Jesus Christ as his savior. In the East, each lifetime is a proving grounds wherein the individual strives to better his accrued karmic lot so that someday he may be released from samsara, the round of rebirth, and merge with Brahman. Perhaps the cores of the Eastern and Western psyches are not as dissimilar as previously thought. At the heart of the issue, however, is the following discrepancy: Genesis, the Judeo-Christian origin myth upon which the Western psyche is rooted, does not tell the story of a selfless act of sacrifice which in turn begets the cosmos. Right from the start, the god of the Old Testament creates an I-thou relationship. As Joseph Campbell so aptly puts it, "As long as an illusion of ego remains, the commensurate illusion of a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa, as long as the idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego, related to it in love, fear, worship, exile or atonement, will also be there" (Campbell, p. 14). It is as if the Western collective psyche produced the myth of Christ the Redeemer in an attempt to glean some of the fruits to be gotten from the Vedic origin myth. Nevertheless, it is this intrinsic difference between the Eastern and Western religious worldview which accounts for our different psyches. According to Swami Vivekananda, "no one can get anything except he earns it; this is an eternal law; we may think it is not so, but in the long run we shall be convinced of it.... A fool may buy all the books in the world, but they will be in his library, and he will only be able to read those he deserves, and this deserving is produced by Karma" ( Vivekananda, p. 20). It is very likely that Carl Jung read most of the books in his library and recognized the oneness found in Eastern religion between the creator and his creation and strove to bring these elements into the West. His karma certainly did unfold in such a way that his theories acted as a bridge in our understanding or the Eastern psyche, and in turn reveal how he was influenced by the Karmic doctrine.
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>
Jung reveals his high esteem for Eastern philosophy in his memorial address for Richard Wilhelm delivered in 1930. In it, he notes that a significant sign of the times is the fact that "Wilhelm and the indologist Hauer were asked to lecture on yoga at this year's congress of German psychotherapists.... Imagine what it means when a practicing physician...establishes contact with an Eastern system of healing!" He further asserts that "I know that our unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism" (CW Vol. 15, p. 90). As evidenced by his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung understood that the Mandalas he had been drawing during and immediately after his confrontation with the unconscious (1912-1918) were "cryptograms concerning the state of the self which were presented to me anew each day. In them I saw the self--that is, my whole being--actively at work" (Memories, p. 196). Not until 1927 when Jung received from Wilhelm a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower, did he receive an "undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center" (Memories, p. 197). Coward points out the stunning parallels between Jung's description of tapas, "a term which can best be rendered as self-brooding" and a passage in the Isa Upanisad which describes the Atman:
This expression clearly pictures the state of meditation without content, in which the libido is supplied to one's own self somewhat in the same manner of incubating heat. As a result of the complete detachment of all affective ties to the object, there is necessarily formed in the inner self an equivalent of objective reality, or a complete identity of inside and outside, which is technically described as tat tvam asi (that art thou). The fusion of the self with its relations to the object produces the identity of the self (atman) with the essence of the world...so that the identity of the inner with the outer atman is cognized. (CW Vol. 6, p. 189).
Compare the above with the following Isa Upanisad passage provided by Coward:
The Atman is unmoving, one, swifter than the mind. The senses do not reach It as It is ever ahead of them. Though Itself standing still It outstrips those who run. In It the all pervading air supports the activities of beings. It moves and It moves not; It is far and It is near; It is within all this and It is also outside all this. (Isa Upanisad 4-5 quoted in Coward).
It is apparent that Jung drew heavily upon the Eastern religious concept of Atman in the formulation of his concept of the Self. If the Self is for Jung a sort of sun in a solar model around which other characters of the psyche revolve, such as the ego, anima, and shadow, then the archetypes would correspond to the primordial stuff of which the sun and all the other planets are composed.
Jung elaborated his pivotal theory of the archetype throughout his life's work. In the Eastern tradition of yoga, Jung found corroboration of his own theories. Coward argues that Jung uses the term yoga to mean a way of life involving both psychology and philosophy. Jung's interest "from the beginning was not with Patanjali's technical definitions but with the spiritual development of the personality as the goal of all yoga" (Coward, p. 3). In October of 1932 Jung gave a series of seminars on chakra symbolism of Tantra Yoga entitled A Psychological Commentary on Kundalini Yoga. In an attempt to define samskara, memory trace, to his Western audience, he likens it to "...our idea of heredity...also, our hypothesis of the collective unconscious" (Kundalini, p. 8). In later editions of On the Psychology of the Unconscious, he placed a footnote at the end of a description of the collective unconscious where he describes it as containing the "...legacy of ancestral life, the mythological images: these are the archetypes..." and calls it "a deliberate extension of the archetype by means of the karmic factor...(which is) essential to deeper understanding of the nature of an archetype" (CW, Vol. 7, p. 118n). Elsewhere Jung states that "we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we understand it a psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist--that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth" (CW Vol. 11, p. 845). Jung continured to refute the notion of a personal karma since "the main bulk of life is brought into existence out of sources that are hidden to us. Even complexes can start a century or more before a man is born. There is something like karma" ("Letters", p. 436). Only later in his life did he begin to accept the possibility of a personal karma, more specific in its implications to a person's destiny than the collective attributes he had always assigned to it in helping him see corroboration of his theory of the collective unconscious in other religions. Jung connects the collective unconscious, ancestral memories and as yet unfilled out archetypal images with a sort of collective karma.
Although Jung openly credits karma theory as influencing his theories of the archetype, Coward aptly points out that little recognition is given to this major Eastern influence by either Jacobi, Jung's sytematizer, or Jungian scholars...this apparent attempt to hide or ignore the Eastern content in Jung's archetype may be...a fear among Jungians that such an admission would make their already suspect psychology even less acceptable to the mainstream of Western psychology (Coward, p. 98).
Jung offers a rebuttal to those who would criticize his theory by wondering "what sort of idea my critics would have used to characterize the empirical material in question" (CW Vol. 7, p. 18n). Later in life Jung's dreams gave him evidence pointing to his own reincarnation. It was the evidence of his own dreams, plus those of a close acquaintance, which led to a very positive assessment of Indian karma and rebirth theory in the last years before his death. In Memories, Deams, Reflections, in the chapter entitled, "On Life after Death," Jung states, "I could well imagine that I have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me. When I die, my deeds will follow along with me - that is how I imagine it" (Memories, p. 318). Jung believed that his purpose this lifetime was to bring the shadow to the Christian archetype. In striving throughout his life to portray the image of god as containing both evil and good, Jung sought to bring a union of the opposites to our Western consciousness so as to avoid the physical playing out upon our lives of the Judeo-Christian god's inherent imbalance.
Works Cited
..</span><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Karma and Archetype: A Teleological Unfolding of Self
By Mark Greene, Ph.D.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
In synchronous step with the advent of a Western psychology of the unconscious, the past century has been witness to an enormous influx and integration of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. Evidence of this intellectual cross-pollination can be seen as early as 1875 in New York City with the founding of the Theosophical society, "a small but active international group of occultists who believed in reincarnation as the necessary path to the ultimate, inevitable purification of humanity" (Encarta). Modern Western science, too, with Planck's introduction of a quantum mechanics theory of sub-atomic particle movement in 1900 and Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905), although not directly influenced by Hinduism or Buddhism, began to describe our perceived notion of physical reality in terms much akin to the age-old Eastern concept of Maya which stipulates that "indeed everything (material) other than Brahman, the indescribable Absolute, is an illusion." In the later part of this century, the influence of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism upon popular Western culture in the form of music, television programming, and a surge of interest in Eastern martial arts is readily apparent.
Of all the ideology found in the rich panoply of Eastern religion, perhaps it is the doctrine of Karma which stands out as the most accessible and fascinating for the psyche of the Western individual. Implicit within the Westerner's understanding of Karma is that one's deeds do not go unnoticed and that, indeed, an individual will be either rewarded or punished for one's actions both in this lifetime and in subsequent incarnations. Perhaps the inculcation of the predominantly Christian doctrine of heaven and hell as after-life possibilities dependent upon our behavior on earth enables the psyche of the Western individual to successfully identify with this aspect of Karma called Ethicization, "the belief that good and bad acts lead to certain results in one life or several lives" (O'Flaherty, p. xi). In so imagining ourselves collectively as children of an Old Testament father capable of compassion and wrath, and then subsequently, as sheep under the loving eye of a pastor (manifest in Jesus of Nazareth), the western psyche readily responds to the Karmic doctrine by supposing someone is watching. Granted, such a perception may be the result of projecting a divine father complex upon the karmic law in order to reformulate the Eastern ordering of existence with Western archetypal images in order to more completely integrate it.
Of interest and primary concern in this paper are the actual roots of the Karmic doctrine and its subsequent integration into the modern Western psyche by way of its profound influence upon the theories and psychology of Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Implicit within the Karmic doctrine is the concept of accumulation; a synthesis of negative and positive actions which add up to a current balance of energy much like the funds available to us in a bank. How one manages to preserve, invest, or squander these funds over the course of one's lifetime is a personal decision. Nevertheless, one cannot spend what is not there. Thus, a coming to terms with predetermined limitations coupled with a concept of free will, in the broadest possible sense, form the two opposing tenants which comprise the single paradoxical law of Karma.
In picturing one's life or lifetimes laid out linearly left-to-right upon a timeline, it would appear that Karma, as a force, concerns itself primarily with the past and the immediate present. Our Karma unfolds and is created in the moment; its momentum progresses on a bearing from left to right, past to present. Jung, however, postulates that life is inherently teleological (telos: end, purpose; the fact or character attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose. Websters). Although Jung allows for the same left-to-right movement on the above described timeline, it is as if the motivating force he believes to be at work is one which attracts the individual towards a final end; it is a force based in the future which exerts its pull upon the individual as opposed to one which propels the individual from the past as implied in the Karmic model. In a description of life as teleological, Jung posits our progress as running to a goal:
Life is an energy-process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. In the long run everything that happens is, as it were, no more than the initial disturbance of a perpetual state of rest which forever attempts to re-establish itself. Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves. (Jung, CW 8: p. 798)
It would appear that Jung takes into account forces which both propel as well as attract the individual as evidenced by his use of the word "directed" in the above passage. Later, this paper will give some examples of how Jung's theory of the archetype accounts for the unconscious "directing" which occurs within the human psyche. In exploring the origins of the word karma, one finds that they can be traced to the Vedic sacrifice: At the most basic level, the Vedic tradition employed the term karman, from the Sanskrit root /kr ("to do"), to describe the "doing" of the sacrificial ritual. However, over the many centuries during which it represented India's "culturally hegemonous" system of belief and practice, the Vedic sacrifice developed into an entity of astounding complexity, and the "doing" of the sacrifice became more than a matter of simple action (Tull, p. 6).
Herman Tull argues that the Vedic sacrifice had as it purpose the invocation of a microcosmic world order, one wherein the laws of the greater cosmos were mirrored and the gods propitiated by a controlled act of death. The Purusasukta, one of the books of the Rgveda, describes the creation of the cosmos by the divinity Purusa in two distinct phases. In the first, he is "spread asunder in all directions, to what eats and does not eat" (Rgveda 10.94.4 qtd. in Tull). Since the cosmos are still in a state of primordial undifferentiation, this spreading of the god Purusa in all directions establishes "him as the stuff or materia prima of creation" (Tull, p. 51). In the second phase of creation, Purusa's distributed essence brings forth the cosmos as manifest in the concrete forms of earth, sun, moon, and humankind. Central to this story is the theme of sacrifice as necessary for creation. In this sense, the supreme act of creation can occur only by way of the supreme act of sacrifice of the creator's body. "The form of this sacrifice is dismemberment" (Rgveda 10.90.11, quoted in Tull). "Purusa's body represents the whole of the undifferentiated cosmos; to bring forth the manifest cosmos, with its several constituents, this whole must be broken up into distinct parts" (Tull, p. 51). And so, upon the fire altar of the sacrifice (Agnicayana), a liminal space is created wherein the performer of the ritual substitutes an offering to be sacrificed in exchange for his ultimate sacrifice which will eventually occur in the burning of his own body on the funeral pyre. In exchange for the controlled act of destruction manifest in the sacrifce, this act which "purports to force access to the other world" expects a response in the form of life, "or in simple terms, one must sacrifice a cow in order to obtain cows" (Heesterman quoted in Tull). It can be said that the Vedic sacrifice itself, the "doing" of the sacrifice, reflects and reinforces the idea that in something dying, something new will be born. At the time of his death, the sacrificer moves into a the macrocosmic sphere and thus transcends the symbolism of the ritual by actually becoming a part of the cosmos. His death and implied rebirth take their form from the structure of the cosmos mirrored in the microcosm of the ritual which he has dutifully performed throughout his life. No longer symbolic, the soul is now an active player in the cosmic dance. In assessing these origins of the Karmic doctrine it becomes evident that to the Eastern psyche life is but an unfolding of a momentum within which we as souls have the fortune to partake. In recognizing creation itself as the result of a selfless act of sacrifice it is fitting to acknowledge that "indeed one becomes good by good action, bad by bad action (Brhadaranyak Upanisad 3.2.13 quoted in Tull). It is left to each individual to assist in the creation of the cosmos by performing good deeds, or at least, living one's life to the fullest by returning to the sacrificial fire what was given to all of us at the moment of creation.
The reader perhaps cannot help but notice doctrinal similarities between the Vedic origin of Karma and that of the Christian archetype. In both, a supreme sacrifice is made by a divinity who's death provides humankind with life. In the case of the West, redemption from evil is manifest as life everlasting as a sort of final destination, one awaiting the believer who confesses his sins and acknowledges Jesus Christ as his savior. In the East, each lifetime is a proving grounds wherein the individual strives to better his accrued karmic lot so that someday he may be released from samsara, the round of rebirth, and merge with Brahman. Perhaps the cores of the Eastern and Western psyches are not as dissimilar as previously thought. At the heart of the issue, however, is the following discrepancy: Genesis, the Judeo-Christian origin myth upon which the Western psyche is rooted, does not tell the story of a selfless act of sacrifice which in turn begets the cosmos. Right from the start, the god of the Old Testament creates an I-thou relationship. As Joseph Campbell so aptly puts it, "As long as an illusion of ego remains, the commensurate illusion of a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa, as long as the idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego, related to it in love, fear, worship, exile or atonement, will also be there" (Campbell, p. 14). It is as if the Western collective psyche produced the myth of Christ the Redeemer in an attempt to glean some of the fruits to be gotten from the Vedic origin myth. Nevertheless, it is this intrinsic difference between the Eastern and Western religious worldview which accounts for our different psyches. According to Swami Vivekananda, "no one can get anything except he earns it; this is an eternal law; we may think it is not so, but in the long run we shall be convinced of it.... A fool may buy all the books in the world, but they will be in his library, and he will only be able to read those he deserves, and this deserving is produced by Karma" ( Vivekananda, p. 20). It is very likely that Carl Jung read most of the books in his library and recognized the oneness found in Eastern religion between the creator and his creation and strove to bring these elements into the West. His karma certainly did unfold in such a way that his theories acted as a bridge in our understanding or the Eastern psyche, and in turn reveal how he was influenced by the Karmic doctrine.
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>
Jung reveals his high esteem for Eastern philosophy in his memorial address for Richard Wilhelm delivered in 1930. In it, he notes that a significant sign of the times is the fact that "Wilhelm and the indologist Hauer were asked to lecture on yoga at this year's congress of German psychotherapists.... Imagine what it means when a practicing physician...establishes contact with an Eastern system of healing!" He further asserts that "I know that our unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism" (CW Vol. 15, p. 90). As evidenced by his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung understood that the Mandalas he had been drawing during and immediately after his confrontation with the unconscious (1912-1918) were "cryptograms concerning the state of the self which were presented to me anew each day. In them I saw the self--that is, my whole being--actively at work" (Memories, p. 196). Not until 1927 when Jung received from Wilhelm a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower, did he receive an "undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center" (Memories, p. 197). Coward points out the stunning parallels between Jung's description of tapas, "a term which can best be rendered as self-brooding" and a passage in the Isa Upanisad which describes the Atman:
This expression clearly pictures the state of meditation without content, in which the libido is supplied to one's own self somewhat in the same manner of incubating heat. As a result of the complete detachment of all affective ties to the object, there is necessarily formed in the inner self an equivalent of objective reality, or a complete identity of inside and outside, which is technically described as tat tvam asi (that art thou). The fusion of the self with its relations to the object produces the identity of the self (atman) with the essence of the world...so that the identity of the inner with the outer atman is cognized. (CW Vol. 6, p. 189).
Compare the above with the following Isa Upanisad passage provided by Coward:
The Atman is unmoving, one, swifter than the mind. The senses do not reach It as It is ever ahead of them. Though Itself standing still It outstrips those who run. In It the all pervading air supports the activities of beings. It moves and It moves not; It is far and It is near; It is within all this and It is also outside all this. (Isa Upanisad 4-5 quoted in Coward).
It is apparent that Jung drew heavily upon the Eastern religious concept of Atman in the formulation of his concept of the Self. If the Self is for Jung a sort of sun in a solar model around which other characters of the psyche revolve, such as the ego, anima, and shadow, then the archetypes would correspond to the primordial stuff of which the sun and all the other planets are composed.
Jung elaborated his pivotal theory of the archetype throughout his life's work. In the Eastern tradition of yoga, Jung found corroboration of his own theories. Coward argues that Jung uses the term yoga to mean a way of life involving both psychology and philosophy. Jung's interest "from the beginning was not with Patanjali's technical definitions but with the spiritual development of the personality as the goal of all yoga" (Coward, p. 3). In October of 1932 Jung gave a series of seminars on chakra symbolism of Tantra Yoga entitled A Psychological Commentary on Kundalini Yoga. In an attempt to define samskara, memory trace, to his Western audience, he likens it to "...our idea of heredity...also, our hypothesis of the collective unconscious" (Kundalini, p. 8). In later editions of On the Psychology of the Unconscious, he placed a footnote at the end of a description of the collective unconscious where he describes it as containing the "...legacy of ancestral life, the mythological images: these are the archetypes..." and calls it "a deliberate extension of the archetype by means of the karmic factor...(which is) essential to deeper understanding of the nature of an archetype" (CW, Vol. 7, p. 118n). Elsewhere Jung states that "we may cautiously accept the idea of karma only if we understand it a psychic heredity in the very widest sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist--that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth" (CW Vol. 11, p. 845). Jung continured to refute the notion of a personal karma since "the main bulk of life is brought into existence out of sources that are hidden to us. Even complexes can start a century or more before a man is born. There is something like karma" ("Letters", p. 436). Only later in his life did he begin to accept the possibility of a personal karma, more specific in its implications to a person's destiny than the collective attributes he had always assigned to it in helping him see corroboration of his theory of the collective unconscious in other religions. Jung connects the collective unconscious, ancestral memories and as yet unfilled out archetypal images with a sort of collective karma.
Although Jung openly credits karma theory as influencing his theories of the archetype, Coward aptly points out that little recognition is given to this major Eastern influence by either Jacobi, Jung's sytematizer, or Jungian scholars...this apparent attempt to hide or ignore the Eastern content in Jung's archetype may be...a fear among Jungians that such an admission would make their already suspect psychology even less acceptable to the mainstream of Western psychology (Coward, p. 98).
Jung offers a rebuttal to those who would criticize his theory by wondering "what sort of idea my critics would have used to characterize the empirical material in question" (CW Vol. 7, p. 18n). Later in life Jung's dreams gave him evidence pointing to his own reincarnation. It was the evidence of his own dreams, plus those of a close acquaintance, which led to a very positive assessment of Indian karma and rebirth theory in the last years before his death. In Memories, Deams, Reflections, in the chapter entitled, "On Life after Death," Jung states, "I could well imagine that I have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me. When I die, my deeds will follow along with me - that is how I imagine it" (Memories, p. 318). Jung believed that his purpose this lifetime was to bring the shadow to the Christian archetype. In striving throughout his life to portray the image of god as containing both evil and good, Jung sought to bring a union of the opposites to our Western consciousness so as to avoid the physical playing out upon our lives of the Judeo-Christian god's inherent imbalance.
Works Cited
..</span><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->