The Seba library treats Kleshas in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Brazier, David, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman).
yoga means literally 'yoking,' i.e., the disciplining of the instinctual forces of the psyche, which in Sanskrit are called kleshas. The yoking aims at controlling these forces that fetter human beings to the world.
Jung furnishes the foundational definition of kleshas within the depth-psychology corpus, rendering them as the instinctual psychic forces that yoga seeks to discipline, and explicitly equates them with Augustinian concupiscence.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
we arrive at what are sometimes called the five dullnesses: greed, hate, delusion, pride and doubt. When these are raised to the intellectual level, instead of being dull, these kleshas become sharp, taking on the form of contentiousness.
Brazier provides the most taxonomically detailed treatment of kleshas in the corpus, tracing their development from three root poisons through five dullnesses to six mula-kleshas, linking them to intellectual opinionatedness and perceptual distortion.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995thesis
Fantasies do not enjoy a good reputation; they are considered cheap and worthless and are therefore rejected as useless and meaningless. They are the kleshas, the disorderly and chaotic instinctual forces which yoga proposes to yoke.
Jung identifies the kleshas with the subjective fantasies that arise during meditation, arguing that both Eastern and Western methods attempt to suppress them by providing the meditator with a prescribed object of concentration.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
It is a Tantric way, if we see it through Hindu eyes. One immerses oneself in the kleshas, the attachments to the Mother Goddess.
Von Franz introduces the Tantric counter-position that immersion in the kleshas — rather than their suppression — constitutes a legitimate path to the feeling function, linking them to the deepest bodily and instinctual attachments.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
the kleshas condition perception. Root relations arise according to the way we cling to some objects and reject others. This clinging and rejecting is just our effort to construct and maintain one particular object, the self.
Brazier articulates the epistemological function of kleshas, arguing that they systematically distort perception by subordinating all experience to the categories of self-interest and self-construction.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995thesis
When the spiritual practitioner decides to fast, they do so, not to lose weight, but to bring the kleshas out into the open where they can be seen and dealt with.
Brazier advances a therapeutically activist reading of kleshas, arguing that deliberate renunciation functions to surface and render visible the conditioning forces that ordinarily operate below awareness.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995supporting
This visualization helps us to reconceptualize the kleshas as the helping hands of Quan-yin.
Brazier proposes a transformative re-framing of kleshas within a therapeutic context, suggesting that visualization practice can convert afflictive forces into instruments of compassionate action.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995supporting