Individuation and Enlightenment:
Complementary visions of the authentic life in India and psychoanalysis.
Interviewing for a job teaching East/West psychology a few years ago, a student asked me to discuss the relationship between “individuation” (meaning Carl Jung’s theory that the aim of life is to achieve an integrated wholeness of the personality) and “enlightenment” (the quest for moksa or nirvana, release from the entangled suffering of life and personality). As it happened, I had thought about this question before. A candidate Jungian psychoanalyst, I had done my first Ph.D. dissertation on Vedic ideas and was the student of an Indian teacher. I had commitments in both camps: Jungian psychology, which saw life tending ideally toward a coherent, meaningful wholeness; and Vedanta, which viewed existence as something to be transcended, burned away in a blaze of objectless consciousness.
That day in San Francisco I answered the student that enlightenment and individuation were very different. Individuation was an example of what I had come to call a “way of totality,” a vision of life emphasizing balance and harmony, a middle way between competing interests, a sort of spiritual or psychic homeostasis. Enlightenment, on the contrary, exemplified, in terms of my categories, a “way of essence,” in which the true flavor or quality of a transcendent reality was all-important, even if it flashed into a life for only a moment. Under the influence of Mircea Eliade’s taxonomic approach to religious ideas, I suggested that the opposition between these categories of “totality” and “essence” could be seen in many places, including classical vs. romantic poetry, Soto vs. Renzai Zen Buddhism, traditional vs. Sufi Islam, and the Roman Church vs. mystics like Saint Teresa. Even movies seemed (and still seem) to me to be analyzable in terms of these categories. As a partisan of “ways of essence,” a great film, for me, has always been one with great moments, even if the overall structure of the film is less than symmetrical. I consider Bernardo Bertolucci, for example, a great director even though his architectonic sense is suspect at best, because he cuts to moments of spine-chilling brilliance at least several times in all his major films.
Indian religious and philosophical traditions are filled with examples of both ways of essence and totality, and the same is true of the Judeo-Christian West. Nevertheless, it has always seemed to me that the most original, the most peculiarly Indian traditions have been ways of essence. I am referring to the upanisadic discussions of the atman and brahman, to advaita vedanta and madhyamaka Buddhism, to nondualistic tantra, and to yoga. The dominant discourse of the Judeo-Christian West, on the other hand, seems primarily to embody ways of totality. Two recent exemplars of the Western tradition of totality are the psychoanalytic schools of Freud and Jung. (For those who don’t see these psychoanalytic Fathers as Judeo-Christian, I recommend David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition and Murray Stein’s Jung’s Treatment of Christianity). While I still find my categories of totality and essence useful, I have never been entirely happy with their stark opposition. Today I hope to suggest how these two visions of authentic human life are implicitly related in both Indian thought and psychoanalysis.
Consider first three Indian traditions: Sankara’s advaita vedanta, samkhya-yoga, and Buddhism. Each posits a basic opposition between two levels of reality and then aims to eliminate the opposition. Samkhya and yoga assert the ultimate difference between consciousness (purusa, cetana, etc.) and the psychomaterial world of objects (prakrti). Ultimately, though, prakrti is to be abandoned by purusa who will live completely isolated from her. In vedanta, worldly reality is opposed to brahman yet everything here, the “snake” in the famous metaphor, is only and nothing but That, the “rope,” brahman. One level sublates the other. The same boundary is dissolved in Buddhism as in Vedanta, but from the other side: the transcendent is seen in Buddhism as nothing but an illusion, and is held to be a product of the selfish ego’s mental process, an idealized self-portrait of ego. Nirvana is nothing transcendent but just the recognition that what was thought “transcendent” is only part of the flow.
All three of these Indian traditions dissolve or leave behind the tension between mundane reality and the Other; in none of them does there appear to be room for human life, seen as a whole, to be of any significance. Individuation would seem to make no sense. Life’s only possible value lies in facilitating or surrendering to the essentially momentary event of enlightenment where the opposition between person and other is overcome.
Consider two moments of enlightenment in these traditions. Exemplary is the Buddha’s nirvana at the moment of seeing the morning star while meditating under the Bodhi tree. The distinctive singularity of sudden enlightenment, the moment that cuts through time, is manifest here. A more recent example is from the life—or mythology—of the Kerala sage, Sri Atmananda Guru. As a spiritual seeker he had been for a time the disciple of a siddha who taught that all was void and formless (avyakta, sunya). Later meeting his true sadguru and becoming enlightened, Sri Atmananda was concerned about his old teacher and paid him a visit. Picking up a twig from the ground and “placing it on his palm he told the siddha, ‘You are able to see the twig because it is in consciousness. Therefore, when it is removed, what is remaining is consciousness and not the void or sunya.’ With emphasis, he said, ‘Keep your stand there’” (Sri Adwayananda, 1998, p. xi). The teacher instantly realized that he was something beyond the void. His mind was filled with light as he broke into tears and fell to the ground, clasping the feet of Sri Atmananda. “He lay in that state of samadhi for four hours” (ibid).
This story gives us a first clue about how enlightenment might relate to a way of life, how it could lend value to a personal history and even make room for individuation. The clue is Sri Atmananda’s words, “keep your stand there.” It is not just a matter of the moment’s enlightenment but of learning to relive the moment, to know a pathway back to it, a repeatable stand toward it. The novelist Raja Rao (The Serpent and the Rope, etc.) is fond of the image of a pathway through thick jungle that opens out at last on the brink of a waterfall. There may be many such paths through the bush, all leading to the same singular vision. Life lived authentically is life that remembers these pathways.
A life lived for the sake of enlightenment is not ordinary life. Surprisingly, it is a life that we ordinary beings are drawn to, recognize as ideal. Only such recognition can explain why characters like Sri Krsna and the Buddha are so compelling and instructive to ordinary people who have not achieved enlightenment. Sri Atmananda expressed this vision of a lived enlightenment through the image of a “world between the guru and the disciple.” His Malayalam poem “Radhamadhavam” retells the story of Radha and Krsna as exemplary of the guru-disciple relationship, imagining the divine couple’s life in Vrindavan as the “world” between them, a springtime world, a world of the morning sandhya, a world of Beginnings. Entering enlightenment is seen in this image as the formation of a world, of a life. Our real life begins with enlightenment.
The image of beginning seen in Sri Atmananda’s Vrindavan “world between guru and disciple” (as also in the Buddha’s morning star) complements another liminal image found in India that appears closer to the Western traditions of psychoanalysis that I will turn to in a moment: the image of sunset, of autumn, and of the end of life.
I find Indian examples of this latter image-cluster of leave-taking in Samkhya-Yoga, a tradition that emphasizes the end times in its goal of deliverance of the consciousness principle, purusa, into a state of isolation when a distinction between that conscious purusa and non-conscious prakrti has finally been established with sufficient discriminating clarity. Samkhya and Yoga assert that this world, the realm of psychomaterial prakrti, moves and functions solely “for purusa’s sake” (purusartha). Because prakrti contains various impurities (klesas) all having their root in the principle of ego (ahamkara) that identifies prakrti with purusa, a state of universal individuation (a Vrindavan) does not exist in the cosmos. Instead, there remains only a possibility of struggle by one of eight basic tendencies of experience (bhavas) against ignorance (avidya) and toward discrimination (vijnana) of purusa from prakrti.
Paradoxically, this discrimination of even the subtlest forms of prakrti (namely, buddhi with purely sattvic quality) from purusa has the effect of rendering this most refined insight (vijnanic buddhi) indistinguishable from purusa. To repeat: the insight that one is not consciousness makes one most similar to consciousness. Implicitly, their relationship at this point becomes like that of Radha and Krsna or the disciple and the guru, though only at the moment of passing beyond.
The Samkhya Karika (verses 58-65) imagines prakrti as a dancer (nartaki) who ceases to dance when she has been seen by her audience, here purusa. The phrase is nivartate nrtyat, “turns back from dance.” The sense is of turning back from a course of action one has been engaged in. At this moment—and this is a great moment, a moment of essence—several things happen. Prakrti sees that she has been seen and stops showing herself to purusa. She achieves a “knowledge” that is pure (visuddham), complete (aparisesam) and solitary (kevala). She realizes that “I am not, I have nothing, and there is no I (in me)” (nasmi na me naham). At the moment of passing away, of negating her self utterly, prakrti has become indistinguishable in quality from purusa. She has his shining purity and essential knowledge and his solitary nature. She, or the person who actualizes this state of realization in life, is related to purusa in maximal intimacy at the moment of passing away from him.
This indistinguishability of purusa and prakrti is also found when Radha attains perfect bhakti (devotion) to Krsna, completely forgets herself and knows only him. At this moment He bows down to touch Radha’s feet. Who at that moment is Krsna, who Radha? Sri Atmananda once had a vision of Radha in meditation. His verse on her reads, “What am I seeing? Is she Laksmi or Sarasvati? Or is she Parvati? Is it Krsna-Paramatma himself?” This union is achieved by netivastu, the way of negation of everything except Krsna, or in Samkhya-Yoga of everything but purusa. “I am not, I own nothing, there is no I in me.” Springtime and fall, end and beginning come together in this image, or as T. S. Eliot put it, “in my end is my beginning.”
In a way, the person is redeemed after being emptied out, restored as herself by the gaze of the One in whose eyes she is seen: the guru, purusa. By directing one’s eye toward purusa, cutting away everything identified as one’s own and being completely devoted to purusa, the person with insightful mind passes away as himself but is brought back, as it were, through the love or the play of the guru.
Let us turn now to individuation as Carl Jung understood it, and combine this with Heinz Kohut’s image of the self as essentially embedded in a matrix of others, called “selfobjects,” who support or undermine selfhood. While these ideas may seem initially very far from the vision of enlightenment expressed in the Indian texts, they will enable us to show how individuation might be organized even after the experience of enlightenment is gained and pathways back to it are clearly internalized. Conversely, the Indian perspectives reviewed above will help us see what individuation could mean in a deeper way, one that adds to Jung’s and Kohut’s thinking and grounds them spiritually.
For Jung, individuation is primarily a project for the latter half of life, and culminates in old age when the “blueprint” of one’s life (to import Kohut’s word), or the “soul’s code” (James Hillman) has had time to organize the particulars of life into an integrated, intelligible entity. This is not, as it might seem, a process of passive unfolding. Desire and anger break through into the ego’s core periodically, forcing it to attend to other powers in the psyche which Jung called “archetypal.” The ego’s relations with them are passionate and agonizing. Moments of archetypal breakthrough—falling in love, leaving one’s family of origin to seek an autonomous life, religious conversion, the recognition of a vocation in life—are like miniature enlightenments, in that they partially overthrow the ego’s sense of being in the center and being in control.
Kohut views the psyche as organized around a sense of self that is at all stages dependent on its selfobjects for sustenance and motivation. The self expands in the second half of life to include more and more of the world, and in its most mature stage of “cosmic narcissism” attains a sense of identity with the universe itself. As with Jung, this is a process of struggle and of suffering. Kohut calls it the realm of “tragic man” whose nature is to lose himself again and again in the process of finding his next stage of selfhood.
For both Jung and Kohut, this developmental process of adulthood involves a repeated decentering of the ego or self. An individuated person (Jung) or one who has achieved mature narcissism (Kohut) is someone who has worked to integrate the necessary other, thereby giving up to a considerable degree her sense of being in charge of her own life.
While echoes of enlightenment are clear in Jung’s discussion of individuation and in the parallel process described by Kohut, we miss the intensity and overwhelming power of the enlightenment experience. There is no Krsna, no purusa, no guru in Jung and Kohut. This is something they were well aware of, and they would not have it any other way. In his weeks sitting aboard ship off the coast of India, too frightened to go ashore, Jung formulated reasons (rationalizations?) for why the “Eastern” abnegation of self would not do for Western people. Kohut tried hard throughout his career to maintain his position in establishment psychoanalysis, though his idea of “cosmic narcissism” pushed him, for many, beyond the pale.
Kohut’s concept, however, and Jung’s analysis of the unconscious, point toward moments of transcendence and enlightenment at the heart of individuation. For Jung, youth is the time for the ego to do its work, developing personal skills and qualities to a high-summer sheen of perfection, so as to be ready for fall’s September song of letting go, making way for the unconscious other to enter into one’s personal space and take up residence there. By the end, one’s early self has been remolded in encounter with the archetypal forces of the unconscious. Neither Kohut nor Jung, however, will go nearly as far as Vedanta and Sankhya-Yoga toward locating the primary self, and especially consciousness, in the Other. This makes it impossible for either to have, or to value positively, a concept of enlightenment like those found in mystical traditions in the West almost as often as in India.
What, then, are the relationships between individuation and enlightenment? From the side of enlightenment, I suggest that it requires an individuated person to remember and to practice the pathways back to the purusa, the guru, brahman. While any fool with good karma can experience a moment of realization, only a mature and disciplined person, one who has learned to treat impulses with a cool eye and to look beyond the day, can live a spiritual life consistently. That person who knows and follows the pathways is beloved and honored by the guru, purusa, Krsna, and maintained in her dharma or nature by the latter.
The world of the guru and disciple is indeed unique, but the individual personality of the disciple is still valuable there, despite now being a personality transformed by the experience of enlightenment. At the center of the personality dwells the guru, Krsna, or consciousness, no longer ego. At its periphery, however, in an honored place, remains the same person she was and that she must continue, day by day, to give up being essentially. With practice, the personality is turned into a whole where every part reflects and is related to the others, all in service of purusa, atman, Sri Krsna. Individuation is oriented around enlightenment and occurs for its sake.
If individuation is vital for the enlightened person, enlightenment—in the sense of recognizing a higher power in place of the ego—is also an essential part of individuation. A difference of degree remains, however. While it is possible to be individuated without experiencing the full bouleversement of enlightenment, it would seem to be a somewhat limited form of individuation lacking a universal viewpoint. For that, the autumnal flaming and laying bare of the personality must, as Sri Atmananda said, be seen in consciousness, and as the person fades away she must recognize that consciousness remains and take her stand there.