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to us by our animal ancestors, primitive human ancestors, ethnic group, nation, tribe,
and family.33 Although these collective memories determine our psychic life to a high
degree, Jung described them as being neutral and becoming filled with content only
when they come into contact with consciousness. As Gerhard Adler notes,
In his later writings Jung expanded and developed the concept of the archetype con-
siderably. He distinguished sharply between the irrepresentable, transcendental ar-
chetype per se and its visible manifestation in consciousness as the archetypal image
or symbol. Moreover the archetype per se appears to be an a priori conditioning fac-
tor in the human psyche, comparable to the biological pattern of behaviour, a dis-
position which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the
human mind and arranges the material of consciousness into definite patterns.34
Jung admitted that direct evidence for these inherited memory complexes was not avail-
able, but he argued that psychic manifestations such as the complexes, images, and sym-
bols that we encounter in dreams, fantasies, and visions are indirect empirical
evidence.35 The second kind of content found in the unconscious consists of past expe-
riences of the individual s own lifetime that have been either forgotten or repressed.
These Jung calls the memories of the personal unconscious.36 Empirical evidence for
their existence is demonstrated when they can be recalled during hypnosis or certain
drug states and yet remain unknowable during ordinary consciousness. It is the making
present of these two types of psychic contents from the unconscious that Jung views as
real memory, as opposed to the artificial memory of something memorized from a
book. We examine Jung s account of the psychological processes involved in memory in
more detail in chapter 6.
.
In Yoga, the unconscious is nothing more than the stored up samskras left be-
hind as memory traces of past thoughts or actions. Like the forgotten or repressed
.
contents of Jung s personal unconscious, some of the samskras will be the memory
traces of thoughts or actions undertaken during this lifetime. But where Yoga differs
.
from Jung is that the vast majority of the samskras making up the unconscious come
not from the collective history of mankind but rather from the individual history of
58 YOGA AND PSYCHOLOGY
.
that particular person s past lives. For Yoga, the vast majority of the samskras stored
in the unconscious are not the forgotten materials from this life, but memory traces
from the actions and thoughts in the innumerable past lives of the individual.
.
Whereas Jung is willing to give sympathetic consideration to this notion of samskras
from the past, if it is understood as a kind of collective psychic heredity, he flatly re-
jects the idea of reincarnation of the individual soul. For Jung, there is no inheritance
of individual prenatal or pre-uterine memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited
archetypes. 37 These archetypes are the universal dispositions of the mind, and they
are to be understood as analogous to Plato s forms (eidola), in accordance with which
the mind organizes its contents. 38
The other major difference between Jung and Yoga has to do with their differ-
ing assessments as to the degree to which the memory and unconscious can be
.
known. For Yoga, meditation is a psychological process whereby the samskras, or
memory traces, of past actions or thoughts are purged from the storehouse of the
unconscious. As these memories of the past are brought up from the unconscious,
their contents momentarily pass through our conscious awareness. It is in this way,
says Yoga, that we come to know all forgotten actions and thoughts from this life as
well as all actions and thoughts composing our past lives. Thus the claim of the great
.
yogins, such as Gautama Buddha, that through intense meditation all samskras are
brought up to the level of awareness, and exhaustive knowledge of one s past lives is
achieved. This yogic accomplishment not only does away with memory, since every-
thing is now present knowledge, but also with the unconscious, since it was nothing
.
but the sum total of the samskras, or memory traces of the past. A perfected yogin,
such as the Buddha, therefore, is said to be totally present a mind uncluttered by the
.
samskras of an unconscious psyche. As the Zen master Eido Roshi put it, meditation
is the removal of mental defilements. Yoga is like a mental vacuum cleaner that re-
.
moves from our minds all the samskras collected during this and previous lives.39
.
Patajali defines yoga as the removal or destruction of all karmic samskras from pre-
vious lives until a completely clear and discriminating mind is achieved.40 For Pata-
.
jali s Yoga, samskras or memory traces function as obstacles to true knowledge of
reality, and their removal by yogic meditation results in omniscience.41
Jung saw that the Yoga viewpoint led to a dissolution of ego and individuality,
and thus to a completely different conception of freedom. Freedom, to Jung, implied
the creative activity of each person s ego in individuating the archetypes. This Jungian
individual freedom is the polar opposite of the Yoga teaching that true freedom is
known only when one gives up all ego-activity. Jung could agree that Yoga for the
Easterner, or individuation for the Westerner, would help an individual to recover
knowledge of thoughts or actions of this life which had been forgotten or repressed.
He would also allow that the same techniques could put one in touch with the arche-
types, or psychic heredity, of the collective unconscious. But here Jung s theory di-
verges from Patajali s Yoga in three ways. The first difference is that, for Jung, one
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cannot speak in terms of individual samskras of previous lives but only of collective
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