My experience is that the unconscious seems to empty,
or contain much less content. Repressed memories and fears appear absent or at least inconsequential. But I don't find references in the Prendergast/undivided literature. ):
FROM http://onehumanjourney.blogspot.com/2010/06/unconscious-in-buddhism-and-jung.html
The Unconscious in Buddhism and Jung by Dennis Hunter
- For the past four weeks, I've been immersed in a Shedra course at the Abbey on Yogacara ("Mind-Only philosophy. In the 5th Century CE, Yogacara Buddhist philosophers asserted the existence of an unconscious dimension of mind called the "alaya-vijñāna," or the "storehouse" consciousness. This famous "eighth consciousness" has many features in common with the modern, Western psychological view of the unconscious as first developed by Sigmund Freud and clarified by Carl Jung.
- My final presentation for the class looks at the similarities and differences between these two systems (ancient and modern) and their respective views of the unconscious mind -- particularly where Jung's psychology overlaps with the 1,500-year-old schematics of the Yogacara philosophers. For source material and analysis, I'm deeply indebted to William Waldron's scholarly paper on this topic.
- Those Buddhist geeks who are interested in viewing a PDF of the presentation can download it here. Enjoy!
FROM http://www.misterdanger.net/books/Buddhism%20Books/The%20buddhist%20unconscious.pdf (downloaded to INQUIRIES folder)
- THE BUDDHIST UNCONSCIOUS by William S. Waldron
- This work focuses upon an explicit notion of unconscious mind formulated by
- the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism in a series of texts from the third to the
- fifth centuries CE. These texts describe and defend this “Buddhist” unconscious
- through a variety of exegetical and metapsychological arguments whose rationales
- are analyzed in terms of their historical and contemporary context. The
- work thus first presents the multivalent conception of consciousness (vijnana)
In contrast with modern humanistic approaches, however, Indian religious systems consider that the processes of creating our “selves” and our “world” – the bifurcation of experience into subject and object – entail actual cosmogonic (cosmos creating) or ontological consequences. As Lama Govinda explains, in the Buddhist world-view it is on account of our clinging to these forms of life that again and again we produce them.…It is our will, our ardent desire which creates the world in which we live, and the organism which corresponds to it. (Govinda, 1969: 54)
This book is an extended examination of these processes and the consequences they set in motion, centering on the Yogacara concept of the alayavijñana, the subliminal “base, store, or home” consciousness, 5 which is always accompanied by an unconscious apprehension of self. The
alaya-vijñana primarily represents this persisting locus of habituated yet unconscious reifications of
self and world and hence constitutes the main obstacle to liberation from the bonds of cyclic existence. Like the other yogic traditions developed in classical Gupta-era India, as Eliade described them, the Yogacara thinkers discovered that “the great obstacles to the ascetic and contemplative life arose from the activity of the unconscious, from the sadskaras and the vasanas – ‘impregnations,’THEMATIC INTRODUCTION 5 ‘residues,’ ‘latencies’ – that constitute what depth psychology calls the contents and structures of the unconscious” (Eliade, 1973: p. xvii). Although we will not
discuss at any length either the practices toward or the results of liberation from these obstacles, our examination of the alaya-vijñana will at least clarify exactly what, in the Yogacara view, one is to be liberated from: the dynamic cognitive and behavioral patterns perpetuating the vicious cycle of repetitive behavioral patterns called samsara.
http://www.zenguide.com/forum/view.cfm?topicid=6788 A discussion topic on the unconscious from a site - note reader's ignorant comments
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