Dhyna

This is the question posed by the philosophy of India, and particularly by Buddhism and Zen. Indirectly, it is the fundamental question, in practice, of all religions and all philosophies.

Jung situates the Indian philosophical tradition — within which Dhyana is a central practice — as posing the fundamental psychological question of the unknown that immediately affects consciousness, implicitly linking contemplative absorption to depth-psychological inquiry.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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mana is not a concept but a representation based on the perception of a ‘phenomenal’ relationship… The discovery of a suitable designation for the nature and essence of the unifying principle was reserved for a later level of culture.

Jung’s account of mana as a pre-conceptual representation of psychic energy parallels the experiential substrate that Dhyana aims to access, framing the depth-psychological approach as a Western analogue to contemplative unitive states.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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states of, 145 time-, 20, 23 universal, 202 unlimited, 50

Zimmer’s index of Indian consciousness terminology — distinguishing individual, ego, universal, and unlimited states — provides the cosmological framework within which Dhyana operates as a practice of moving between restricted and unrestricted consciousness.

Zimmer, Heinrich, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946aside

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the very advantage that such individuals enjoy consists precisely in the permeability of the partition separating the conscious and the unconscious.

Jung’s description of the permeable boundary between conscious and unconscious in creative individuals approximates, in Western psychological idiom, the liminal state cultivated in Dhyana practice.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside

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This edition published in Great Britain by Rider in 2021 Published in the United States by Vintage Books

Watts’s The Way of Zen, while present only in bibliographic form here, represents the principal bridge text in the corpus connecting Zen meditative absorption — historically related to Dhyana through the Ch’an transmission — to Western psychological and philosophical audiences.

Watts, Alan, The Way of Zen, 1957aside

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