One Mind

The term ‘One Mind’ occupies a distinctive and demanding position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a metaphysical absolute and as a psychological category. Its most sustained treatment appears in Evans-Wentz’s editorial apparatus to the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, where it designates the primordial, unmodified ground of consciousness that transcends all dualities — Samsara and Nirvana, dreaming and waking, time and space — and from which all phenomenal particularization arises. The term thus carries the weight of the Mahayana dharmadhatu and the Yogachara alaya-vijnana, rendered accessible to Western readers through an implicit equation with universal consciousness. Jung’s psychological commentary on this same text introduces the decisive critical tension: he reads ‘One Mind’ as functionally equivalent to the unconscious, praising its phenomenological accuracy while insisting that the realization of such a totality must always remain incomplete for any finite subject, since even the act of knowing implies a residual ego distinct from what is known. This epistemological check on Eastern non-dualism is among the most carefully argued passages in the Jungian corpus. Evans-Wentz, by contrast, treats realization of the One Mind as the precise equivalent of Brahmanical Moksha and Mahayana Nirvana — attainable, not merely asymptotic. The term thus stands at the intersection of comparative mysticism, depth psychology, and epistemology, generating productive and unresolved friction.

In the library 10 passages

The realization of the One Mind is, as our text says, the ‘at-one-ment of the Trikaya’; in fact it creates the at-one-ment. But we are unable to imagine how such a realization could ever be complete in any human individual.

Jung argues that while the One Mind is identified with the Trikaya’s at-one-ment, its complete realization is structurally impossible for any human subject because the very act of knowing preserves an irreducible residual ego.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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This section shows very clearly that the One Mind is the unconscious, since it is characterized as ‘eternal, unknown, not visible, not recognized.’

Jung identifies the One Mind with the psychological unconscious on the basis of its shared attributes of hiddenness and invisibility, while also acknowledging its positive, luminous Eastern characterization.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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Realization of the One Mind, through introspectively attaining understanding of the true nature of its macrocosmic aspect innate in man, is equivalent to the attainment of the Brahmanical Moksha (or Mukhti), the Mahayana Nirvana.

Evans-Wentz establishes the One Mind as the common soteriological goal across Brahmanical and Mahayana traditions, achieved through introspective self-knowledge of its macrocosmic dimension.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954thesis

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man attains knowledge of the selfless self, beyond self, the Self of All, the One Mind, beyond mind.

Evans-Wentz presents the One Mind as the ultimate destination of yogic self-inquiry, transcending both the personal self and ordinary mind in a non-dual realization.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954thesis

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the One Mind embraces the whole Samsara and Nirvana and all other dualities, mind per se also transcends space.

The One Mind is defined as the all-encompassing ground that contains every duality including Samsara and Nirvana, while itself remaining beyond spatial and temporal limitation.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954thesis

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Some call it ‘The Mental Self’. Certain heretics call it ‘The Ego’. By the Hinayanists it is called ‘The Essentiality of Doctrines’. By the Yogachara it is called ‘Wisdom’.

The passage catalogues the proliferation of traditional names applied to the One Mind across Buddhist schools, demonstrating its doctrinal centrality while underscoring the limitations of verbal designation.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting

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By not taking the mind to be naturally a duality, and allowing it, as the primordial consciousness, to abide in its own place, beings attain deliverance.

The passage articulates the practical soteriological implication of the One Mind doctrine: liberation is achieved by ceasing to bifurcate the primordial consciousness and permitting it to rest in its natural, non-dual state.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting

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the student should make careful study not only of occidental psychology, but, more especially, of the psychologically-based philosophy of the Orient; and no better guidance therein can be found than the teachings concerning the Illusory Body and Dreams.

Evans-Wentz positions the One Mind’s yoga within a comparative framework that explicitly invites dialogue between Western depth psychology and Oriental philosophical psychology.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting

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The gods are archetypal thought-forms belonging to the sambhogakaya. Their peaceful and wrathful aspects, which play a great role in the meditations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, symbolize the opposites.

Jung’s prefatory characterization of the sambhogakaya gods as archetypal thought-forms provides the psychological framework within which the One Mind’s transcendence of opposites is later interpreted.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954aside

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By acknowledging that these fields are transpersonally generated and not personally created, we can begin to reestablish a relationship between the ego/consciousness and the transpersonal.

Conforti’s notion of transpersonally generated archetypal fields gestures toward a structural analogue to the One Mind in post-Jungian field theory, though the term itself is not employed.

Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999aside

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