Samādhi as perceptual transformation: a re-examination of Jung’s views on yoga

ABSTRACT

For Jung, yoga was a broad concept encompassing Eastern practices from many different traditions. Jung’s understanding of the Yoga Sūtras was based on the late nineteenth century yoga revival and its interpretation of the Yoga Sūtras. By that time, the Classical Yoga school had long become extinct with no pandits or adepts from existent Classical Yoga lineages. Jung incorrectly understood samādhi to be an ontological state equivalent to unconsciousness from the perspective of his own model of the psyche. In fact, samādhi implies epistemic insight and the transformation of perception. Jung’s misconstrual of samādhi as an ontological state of unconsciousness arose from the widely divergent ground separating the concepts of consciousness and ego in Jung’s model of the psyche and Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtras. While consciousness in Jung’s model is delimited to a field of awareness anchored in the ego complex, consciousness from the perspective of six orthodox Astika darśanas is the universal underlying transcendent principle prior to and underlying ego. Ego, or egoity, from the perspective of the Yoga Sūtras, is one of the epistemic hindrances veiling one’s true identity as a purușa. Ultimately, Jung’s misunderstanding arises from his understanding of samādhi as an ontological, rather than epistemic, concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytical psychology
• consciousness
• ego
• Jung
• Patanjali
• Samādhi
• self
• Yoga Sūtras

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Timothy Schipke is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East-West Psychology, a depth psychology program, at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. He is currently working on his dissertation, a qualitative narrative study on the transition from sickness to dying in palliative care. He completed his M.A. in Counseling Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University) in Palo Alto, CA in 2013. He is also a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Besides death and dying and narrative research methodology, his scholarly interests include mysticism, East Indian religions (particularly non-dualistic Kashmir Shaivism), Jungian psychology, transpersonal psychology, and concepts of self.

ORCID

Timothy Schipke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0988-5867