Theos-Talk Archives (April 1995 Message tl00158)

Alan: <Jung gives very clear (and different from your
apparent usage) definitions of psyche and ego.  The
latter, for example, he sees as a complex within the
personal unconscious, and actually call it "the ego
complex" - that is, a collection of affective
experience(s) which calls itself "I" from a number of
differing viewpoints (cf. Ouspensky).>

Yes, his definition of ego or "ego complex" is very
Buddhist, and many Buddhists agree with him.  Let me give
you a quote to chew on:

   "The ego, the subject of consciousness,
   comes into existence as a complex quantity
   which is constituted partly by the
   inherited disposition (character
   constituents) and partly by unconsciously
   acquired impressions and their attendant
   phenomena.  The psyche itself, in
   relation to consciousness, is pre-
   existent, and transcendent."  (Jung,
   Collected Works, Vol 17, p 91)

And another:

   "By virtue of its indefinite extension,
   the unconscious might be compared to the
   sea, while the consciousness is like an
   island rising out of its midst."  (Jung,
   CW, Vol 17, p 51)

Now, the picture of a wave rising up from the ocean and
then falling back into it has long been taught in the East
as a metaphor for ourselves undergoing the process of
reincarnation from a purely esoteric standpoint.  Here
Jung comes very close to accepting reincarnation in the
sense of the psyche taking on a new ego-complex.

Alan: < If that is so, we are dumped here unjustly, for we
have (it says again) to learn the lessons bestowed by
karma from past lives without being allowed to remember
what we did wrong.>

Nobody ever said that life was fair. :-)  Are nightmares
fair?  Actually I see the learning or "school house" model
as very exoteric.  In a more esoteric sense (which means
it can't be put into words correctly, but only in an
approximation) we come here like artists to express
ourselves and our unfulfilled desires.  But since the ego,
like the body, is new each time around, it has nothing
whatever to "remember" any more than the body does.  Only
the psyche or atma-buddhi "remembers" and its memory is
but the "essence," as HPB puts it, of each past life.
So I would agree with you that those folks who remember
tiny details of past lives, are probably focusing in on
something else.

Alan: <To accept anything "on faith" is a dubious
proposition.  Insofar as faith=trust then we will only
trust what or who we already know to be a reliable source
or witness.>

Children must trust in their parents, or face the trust vs
mistrust issue of Erikson's first developmental stage (in
other words, without trust we human beings cannot have a
healthy growth).  We all must trust that this world was
created and is maintained by someone (or some others)
superior to us.  Most of us trust that justice will win
out somehow and somewhere, either soon in Heaven or
karmically on Earth in some future life, or here after the
ressurection, or something.  The desire (or intuitive
conviction) for justice burns in the hearts of most of us.
Yet we certainly see little of it when we look at the
world around us or watch the evening news.

Many people have faith or trust in a higher power of some
kind.  The problem is, just what do we "know to be a
reliable source or witness?"  Our senses?  Our intuition?
Because most of us have nagging doubts about all of the
sources of information about this world, we have faith in
something that we cannot yet witness or observe directly.

It is healthy to doubt, up to a point.  But most Doubting
Thomases are crass materialists, and my problem is that I
can't trust my own senses very much (neither physical,
astral, nor mental -- all are suspect).

Alan: < I have past life memories, but I do not believe
that they are necessarily memories of my own personal
experience - only that they are memories of past lives.
Spelling it out: they could just as easily be the real
memories of people who have gone before, and are long
since "dead" by our usual definition of death.  Who or
where they are now is another story.>

This is exactly the Tibetan teaching that we are each a
collection-of-others.  If the subjective self doesn't
exist (i.e., the ego, soul, and spirit are all aggragates
and thus have no suchness) then how can they reincarnate?
The Tibetans answer this question by postulating a
collection-of-others, which is like saying that we are
each a monadic host, rather than a single eternal monad.

Jerry S.