type_Document_Title

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE
DEAD

PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY By Dr.
C. G. Jung
Translated by R. F. C. Hull from DOS
Tibetanische Toienbuch

Before embarking upon the psychological commentary, I should like to say a few words about the text itself. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bardo Thodol, is a book of instructions for the dead and dying. Like The Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is meant to be a guide for the dead man during the period of his Bardo existence, symbolically described as an intermediate state of forty- nine days' duration between death and rebirth.

1 To one of Dr. Jung's most successful disciples.
Dr. James Kirsch, Analytical Psychologist, of Los
Angeles, California, who has discussed this
Psychological Commentary with Dr. Jung in
Zurich and aided in its English translation, the
Editor is indebted for the important prefatory
admonition which follows, addressed to the
Oriental reader:-
' This book addresses itself, primarily, to the
Occidental reader, and attempts to describe
important Oriental experiences and conceptions in
Occidental terms. Dr. Jung seeks to facilitate this
difficult undertaking by his Psychological
Commentary. It is, therefore, unavoidable that, in
so doing, he employs terms which are familiar to
the Occidental mind but which are, in some
instances, objectionable to the Oriental mind.
"One such objectionable term is "soul".
According to Buddhistic belief, the " soul " is
ephemeral, is an illusion, and, therefore, has no
real existence. The Germanic word " Seele ", as
employed in the original German version of this
Psychological Commentary, is not synonymous
with the English word " Soul ", although
commonly so translated. " Seele " is an ancient
word, sanctioned by Germanic tradition and used,
by outstanding German mystics like Eckhart and
great German poets like Goethe, to signify the
Ultimate Reality, symbolized in feminine, or
shakti, aspect. Herein, Dr. Jung uses it poetically
with reference to the " Psyche ", as the Collective
Psyche. In psychological language it represents
the Collective Unconscious, as being the matrix of
everything. It is the womb of everything, even of
the Dharma-Kaya; it is the Dharma-K&ya itself.
' Accordingly, Oriental readers are invited to
put aside, for the time being, their understanding
of " soul " and to accept Dr. Jung's use of the
word, in order to be able to follow him with an
open mind into the depths where he seeks to build
a bridge from the Shore of the Orient to the Shore
of the Occident, and to tell of the various paths
leading to the Great Liberation, the Una Salus.'

XXXVI
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

The text falls into three parts. The first part, called Chikhai Bardo, describes the psychic
happenings at the moment of death. The second part, or Chonyid Bardo, deals with the
dream-state which supervenes immediately after death, and with what are called '
karmic illusions '. The third part, or Sidpa Bardo, concerns the onset of the birth-
instinct and of prenatal events. It is characteristic that supreme insight and
illumination, and hence the greatest possibility of attaining liberation, are vouchsafed
during the actual process of dying. Soon afterward, the ' illusions' begin which lead
eventually to reincarnation, the illuminative lights growing ever fainter and more
multifarious, and the visions more and more terrifying. This descent illustrates the
estrangement of consciousness from the liberating truth as it approaches nearer and
nearer to physical rebirth. The purpose of the instruction is to fix the attention of the
dead man, at each successive stage of delusion and entanglement, on the ever-present
possibility of liberation, and to explain to him the nature of his visions. The text of the
Bardo Thodol is recited by the lama in the presence of the corpse.
I do not think I could better discharge my debt of thanks to the two previous
translators of the Bardo Thodol, the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup and Dr. Evans-
Wentz, than by attempting, with the aid of a psychological commentary, to make the
magnificent world of ideas and the problems contained in this treatise a little more
intelligible to the Western mind. I am sure that all who read this book with open eyes,
and who allow it to impress itself upon them without prejudice, will reap a rich
reward.
The Bardo Thodol, fitly named by its editor. Dr. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, ' The Tibetan
Book of the Dead ', caused a considerable stir in English-speaking countries at the time
of its first appearance in 1927. It belongs to that class of writings which are not only of
interest to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but which also, because of their deep
humanity and their still deeper insight into the secrets of the human psyche, make an
especial appeal to the layman who is seeking to broaden his knowledge of life. For
years, ever since it was first published, the Bardo Thodol has been my constant
companion, and to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also
many fundamental insights. Unlike The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which always
prompts one

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY
XXXVll
to say too much or too little, the Bardo Thodol offers one an intelligible philosophy
addressed to human beings rather than to gods or primitive savages. Its philosophy
contains the quintessence of Buddhist psychological criticism; and, as such, one can
truly say that it is of an unexampled superiority. Not only the ' wrathful ' but also the '
peaceful' deities are conceived as sangsaric projections of the human psyche, an idea
that seems all too obvious to the enlightened European, because it reminds him of his
own banal simplifications. But though the European can easily explain away these
deities as projections, lie would be quite incapable of positing them at the same time
as real. The Bardo Thodol can do that, because, in certain of its most essential
metaphysical premises, it has the enlightened as well as the unenlightened European at
a disadvantage. The ever-present, unspoken assumption of the Bardo Thodol is the
antinominal character of all metaphysical assertions, and also the idea of the
qualitative difference of the various levels of consciousness and of the metaphysical
realities conditioned by them. The background of this unusual book is not the
niggardly European ' either-or', but a magnificently affirmative ' both-and'. This
statement may appear objectionable to the Western philosopher, for the West loves
clarity and unambiguity; consequently, one philosopher clings to the position, ' God
is', while another clings equally fervently to the negation. ' God is not'. What would
these hostile brethren make of an assertion like the following:
' Recognizing the voidness of thine own intellect to be Buddha-hood, and knowing
it at the same time to be thine own consciousness, thou shalt abide in the state of the
divine mind of the Buddha.'
Such an assertion is, I fear, as unwelcome to our Western philosophy as it is to our
theology. The Bardo Thodol is in the highest degree psychological in its outlook; but,
with us, philosophy and theology are still in the mediaeval, pre-psychological stage
where only the assertions are listened to, explained, defended, criticized and disputed,
while the authority that makes them has, by general consent, been deposed as outside
the scope of discussion.
Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore
psychological. To the Western mind, which compensates its well-known feelings of
resentment by a slavish

xxxviii PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY
regard for ' rational' explanations, this obvious truth seems all too obvious, or else it is
seen as an inadmissible negation of metaphysical ' truth'. Whenever the Westerner
hears the word ' psychological', it always sounds to him like' only psychological'. For
him the ' soul' is something pitifully small, unworthy, personal, subjective, and a lot
more besides. He therefore prefers to use the word ' mind' instead, though he likes to
pretend at the same time that a statement which may in fact be very subjective indeed
is made by the ' mind', naturally by the ' Universal Mind ', or even-at a pinch-by the
' Absolute' itself. This rather ridiculous presumption is probably a compensation for
the regrettable smallness of the soul. It almost seems as if Anatole France had uttered
a truth which were valid for the whole Western world when, in his Penguin Island,
Catherine d'Alexandrie offers this advice to God: ' Donnez lew une ame, mais une
petite'! [' Give them a soul, but a little one!']
It is the soul which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the
metaphysical assertion; it posits the distinctions between metaphysical entities. Not
only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality.1
With this great psychological truth the Bardo Thodol opens. The book is not a
ceremonial of burial, but a set of instructions for the dead, a guide through the
changing phenomena of the Bardo realm, that state of existence which continues for
49 days after death until the next incarnation. If we disregard for the moment the
supra-temporality of the soul-which the East accepts as a self-evident fact-we, as
readers of the Bardo Thodol. shall be able to put ourselves without difficulty in the
position of the dead man, and shall consider attentively the teaching set forth in the
opening section, which is outlined in the quotation above. At this point, the following
words are spoken, not pre-sumptuously, but in a courteous manner:-
' 0 nobly-bom (so and so), listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the
Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. 0 nobly-bom, thy present intellect, in real
nature void, not
^his paragraph makes apparent the interpretative importance of the annotation set
forth above, page xxxv, concerning the difference in meaning of the term ' soul ' of the
English rendering and of the term ' Seele ' of the original German; and, at this point,
readers would benefit by re-reading the annotation.

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY xxxix
formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very
Reality, the All-Good.
' Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the
voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstruced, shining,
thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha.'
This realization is the Dharma-KSya state of perfect enlightenment; or, as we
should express it in our own language, the creative ground of all metaphysical
assertion is consciousness, as the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul. The '
Voidness ' is the state transcendent over all assertion and all predication. The fulness
of its discriminative manifestations still lies latent in the soul.
The text continues:-
' Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of
Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light-Buddha
Amitabha.'
The soul [or, as here, one's own consciousness] is assuredly not small, but the
radiant Godhead itself. The West finds this statement either very dangerous, if not
downright blasphemous, or else accepts it unthinkingly and then suffers from a
theosophical inflation. Somehow we always have a wrong attitude to these things. But
if we can master ourselves far enough to refrain from our chief error of always
wanting to do something with things and put them to practical use, we may perhaps
succeed in learning an important lesson from these teachings, or at least in
appreciating the greatness of the Bardo Thodol, which vouchsafes to the dead man the
ultimate and highest truth, that even the gods are the radiance and reflection of our
own souls. No sun is thereby eclipsed for the Oriental as it would be for the Christian,
who would feel robbed of his God; on the contrary, his soul is the light of the
Godhead, and the Godhead is the soul. The East can sustain this paradox better than
the unfortunate Angelus Silesius, who even today would be psychologically far in
advance of his time.
It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the
primacy of the soul, for that is the one thing which

xl PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY
life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and
oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these ' given' things, to wonder
by whom they are ' given '. It is from this world of ' given ' things that the dead man
liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this
liberation. We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it,
since we leam from the very first paragraphs that the ' giver ' of all ' given ' things
dwells within us. This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest
things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary,
indeed vital, for us to know it. Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for
contemplativeswho are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who
are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a saviour who, like the saviour
of the Mandaeans, calls himself ' gnosis of life ' (manda d'hajie). Perhaps it is not
granted to many of us to see the world as something ' given '. A great reversal of
standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as '
given' by the very nature of the soul. It is so much more straight-forward, more
dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see that all the things happen
to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man
makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances. That is why
attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule
in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal. And, in
point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead
man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction
is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the
initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond. Such was the case, at least,
with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and
Eleusinian mysteries. In the initiation of the living, however, this ' Beyond' is not a
world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a
psychological ' Beyond ' or, in Christian terms, a ' redemption' from the trammels of
the world and of sin. Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier con-
dition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY xli
of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything '
given '.
Thus far the Bardo Thodol is, as Dr. Evans-Wentz also feels, an initiation process
whose purpose it is to restore to the soul the divinity it lost at birth. Now it is a
characteristic of Oriental religious literature that the teaching invariably begins with
the most important item, with the ultimate and highest principles which, with us,
would come last-as for instance in Apuleius, where Lucius is worshipped as Helios
only right at the end. Accordingly, in the Bardo Thodol, the initiation is a series of
diminishing climaxes ending with rebirth in the womb. The only ' initiation process '
that is still alive and practiced today in the West is the analysis of the unconscious as
used by doctors for therapeutic purposes. This penetration into the ground-layers of
consciousness is a kind of rational maieutics in the Socratic sense, a bringing forth of
psychic contents that are still germinal, subliminal, and as yet unborn. Originally, this
therapy took the form of Freudian psychoanalysis and was mainly concerned with
sexual fantasies. This is the realm that corresponds to the last and lowest region of the
Bardo, known as the Sidpa Bardo, where the dead man, unable to profit by the teach-
ings of the Chikhai and ChSnyid Bardo, begins to fall a prey to sexual fantasies and is
attracted by the vision of mating couples. Eventually he is caught by a womb and born
into the earthly world again. Meanwhile, as one might expect, the Oedipus complex
starts functioning. If his karma destines him to be reborn as a man, he will fall in love
with his mother-to-be and will find his father hateful and disgusting. Conversely, the
future daughter will be highly attracted by her father-to-be and repelled by her
mother. The European passes through this specifically Freudian domain when his
unconscious contents are brought to light under analysis, but he goes in the reverse
direction. He journeys back through the world of infantile-sexual fantasy to the
womb. It has even been suggested in psychoanalytical circles that the trauma par
excellence is the birth-experience itself-nay more, psychoanalysts even claim to
have probed back to memories of intra-uterine origin. Here Western reason reaches its
limit, unfortunately. I say ' unfortunately', because one rather wishes that Freudian
psychoanalysis could have happily pursued these so-

xlii PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY
called intra-uterine experiences still further back; had it succeeded in this bold
undertaking, it would surely have come out beyond the Sidpa Bardo and penetrated
from behind into the lower reaches of the Chonyid Bardo. It is true that with the
equipment of our existing biological ideas such a venture would not have been
crowned with success; it would have needed a wholly different kind of philosophical
preparation from that based on current scientific assumptions. But, had the journey
back been consistently pursued, it would undoubtedly have led to the postulate of a
pre-uterine existence, a true Bardo life, if only it had been possible to find at least
some trace of an experiencing subject. As it was, the psychoanalysis never got beyond
purely conjectural traces of intra-uterine experiences, and even the famous ' birth
trauma' has remained such an obvious truism that it can no longer explain anything,
any more than can the hypothesis that life is a disease with a bad prognosis because its
outcome is always fatal.
Freudian psychoanalysis, in all essential aspects, never went beyond the
experiences of the Sidpa Bardo; that is, it was unable to extricate itself from sexual
fantasies and similar ' incompatible ' tendencies which cause anxiety and other
affective states. Nevertheless, Freud's theory is the first attempt made by the West to
investigate, as if from below, from the animal sphere of instinct, the psychic territory
that corresponds in Tantric Lamaism to the Sidpa Bardo. A very justifiable fear of
metaphysics prevented Freud from penetrating into the sphere of the ' occult'. In
addition to this, the Sidpa state, if we are to accept the psychology of the Sidpa Bardo,
is characterized by the fierce wind of karma, which whirls the dead man along until
he comes to the ' womb-door'. In other words, the Sidpa state permits of no going
back, because it is sealed off against the Chonyid state by an intense striving
downwards, towards the animal sphere of instinct and physical rebirth. That is to say,
anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will
become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will
be pulled back again and again into physical existence. It is therefore not possible for
Freudian theory to reach anything except an essentially negative valuation of the
unconscious. It is a' nothing

xliii
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

but'. At the same time, it must be admitted that this view of the psyche is typically
Western, only it is expressed more blatantly, more plainly, and more ruthlessly than
others would have dared to express it, though at bottom they think no differently. As
to what' mind ' means in this connection, we can only cherish the hope that it will
carry conviction. But, as even Max Scheler noted with regret, the power of this ' mind'
is, to say the least of it, is doubtful.
I think, then, we can state it as a fact that with the aid of psychoanalysis the
rationalizing mind of the West has pushed forward into what one might call the
neuroticism of the Sidpa state, and has there been brought to an inevitable standstill
by the uncritical assumption that everything psychological is subjective and personal.
Even so, this advance has been a great gain, inasmuch as it has enabled us to take one
more step behind our conscious lives. This knowledge also gives us a hint of how we
ought to read the Bardo Thodol-that is, backwards. If, with the help of our Western
science, we have to some extent succeeded in understanding the psychological
character of the Sidpa Bardo, our next task is to see if we can make anything of the
preceding ChSnyid Bardo.
The Chonyid state is one of karmic illusion-that is to say, illusions which result
from the psychic residua of previous existences. According to the Eastern view,
karma implies a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of reincar-
nation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supra-temporality of the soul.
Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason can keep in step with this idea. There
are too many if's and but's. Above all, we know desperately little about the
possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we
cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.
Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof
would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept the
idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest sense of
the word. Psychic heredity does exist-that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic
characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and
so forth. It does no violence to the psychic

xliv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

nature of these complex facts if natural science reduces them to what appear to be
physical aspects (nuclear structures in cells, and so on). They are essential phenomena
of life which express themselves, in the main, psychically, just as there are other
inherited characteristics which express themselves, in the main, physiologically, on the
physical level. Among these inherited psychic factors there is a special class which is
not confined either to family or to race. These 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. One could also describe these forms as
categories analogous to the logical categories which are always and everywhere present
as the basic postulates of reason. Only, in the case of our ' forms', we are not dealing
with categories of reason but with categories of the imagination. As the products of
imagination are always in essence visual, their forms must, from the outset, have the
character of images and moreover of typical images, which is why, following St.
Augustine, I call them ' archetypes'. Comparative religion and mythology are rich mines
of archetypes, and so is the psychology of dreams and psychoses. The astonishing
parallelism between these images and the ideas they serve to express has frequently
given rise to the wildest migration theories, although it would have been far more
natural to think of the remarkable similarity of the human psyche at all times and in all
places. Archetypal fantasy-forms are, in fact, reproduced spontaneously anytime and
anywhere, without there being any conceivable trace of direct transmission. The
original structural components of the psyche are of no less surprising a uniformity than
are those of the visible body. The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational
psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific
content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual's life, when
personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. If the archetypes were not pre-
existent in identical form everywhere, how could one explain the fact, postulated at
almost every turn by the Bardo Thodol, that the dead do not know that they are dead,
and that this assertion is to be met with just as often in the dreary, half-baked literature
of European and American Spiritualism? Although we find the same

xlv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

assertion in Swedenborg, knowledge of his writings can hardly be sufficiently
widespread for this little bit of information to have been picked up by every small-
town' medium '. And a connection between Swedenborg's and the Bardo Thodol is
completely unthinkable. It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply
continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits-
an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever
anyone sees a ghost. It is significant, too, that ghosts all over the world have certain
features in common. I am naturally aware of the unverifiable spiritualistic hypothesis,
though I have no wish to make it my own. I must content myself with the hypothesis
of an omnipresent, but differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which
necessarily gives a certain form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs
of the body are not mere lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic,
functional complexes which assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the
archetypes, as organs of the psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which
determine psychic life to an extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them
dominants of the unconscious. The layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of
these universal dynamic forms I have termed the collective unconscious.
So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine,
memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid
of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only
emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible. As
we have seen, Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be bom. (The Sidpa
Bardo is the ' Bardo of Seeking Rebirth'.) Such a state, therefore, precludes any
experience of transubjective psychic realities, unless the individual refuses
categorically to be bom back again into the world of consciousness. According to the
teachings of the Bardo Thodol, it is still possible for him, in each of the Bardo states,
to reach the Dharma-Kaya by transcending the four-faced Mount Meru, provided that
he does not yield to his desire to follow the ' dim lights'. This is as much as to say that
the dead man must desperately resist the dictates of reason, as we understand it.

xliii
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

but'. At the same time, it must be admitted that this view of the psyche is typically
Western, only it is expressed more blatantly, more plainly, and more ruthlessly than
others would have dared to express it, though at bottom they think no differently. As
to what' mind ' means in this connection, we can only cherish the hope that it will
carry conviction. But, as even Max Scheler noted with regret, the power of this ' mind'
is, to say the least of it,
doubtful.
I think, then, we can state it as a fact that with the aid of psychoanalysis the
rationalizing mind of the West has pushed forward into what one might call the
neuroticism of the Sidpa state, and has there been brought to an inevitable standstill
by the uncritical assumption that everything psychological is subjective and
personal. Even so, this advance has been a great gain, inasmuch as it has enabled us
to take one more step behind our conscious lives. This knowledge also gives us a
hint of how we ought to read the Bardo Thodol-that is, backwards. If, with the help
of our Western science, we have to some extent succeeded in understanding the
psychological character of the Sidpa Bardo, our next task is to see if we can make
anything of the preceding ChSnyid Bardo.
The Chonyid state is one of karmic illusion-that is to say, illusions which result
from the psychic residua of previous existences. According to the Eastern view,
karma implies a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of
reincarnation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supra-temporality of the
soul. Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason can keep in step with this idea.
There are too many if's and but's. Above all, we know desperately little about the
possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we
cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.
Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof
would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept
the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest
sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist-that is to say, there is inheritance of
psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special
gifts, and so forth. It does no violence to the psychic

xliv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

xlv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

assertion in Swedenborg, knowledge of his writings can hardly be sufficiently
widespread for this little bit of information to have been picked up by every small-town'
medium '. And a connection between Swedenborg's and the Bardo Thodol is completely
unthinkable. It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly
existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits-an archetypal idea which
enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. It is
significant, too, that ghosts all over the world have certain features in common. I am
naturally aware of the unverifiable spiritualistic hypothesis, though I have no wish to
make it my own. I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but
differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain
form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs of the body are not mere
lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which
assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the
psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an
extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them dominants of the unconscious. The
layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have
termed the collective unconscious.
So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine,
memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid
of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only
emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible. As
we have seen, Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be bom. (The Sidpa
Bardo is the ' Bardo of Seeking Rebirth'.) Such a state, therefore, precludes any
experience of transubjective psychic realities, unless the individual refuses categorically
to be bom back again into the world of consciousness. According to the teachings of the
Bardo Thodol, it is still possible for him, in each of the Bardo states, to reach the
Dharma-Kaya by transcending the four-faced Mount Meru, provided that he does not
yield to his desire to follow the ' dim lights'. This is as much as to say that the dead man
must desperately resist the dictates of reason, as we understand it.

xlvi
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

and give up the supremacy of egohood, regarded by reason as sacrosanct. What this
means in practice is complete capitulation to the objective powers of the psyche, with
all that this entails; a kind of symbolical death, corresponding to the Judgement of the
Dead in theSidpa Bardo. It means the end of all conscious, rational, morally
responsible conduct of life, and a voluntary surrender to what the Bardo Thodol calls '
karmic illusion '. Karmic illusion springs from belief in a visionary world of an
extremely irrational nature, which neither accords with nor derives from our rational
judgements but is the exclusive product of uninhibited imagination. It is sheer dream or
' fantasy ', and every well-meaning person will instantly caution us against it; nor
indeed can one see at first sight what is the difference between fantasies of this kind
and the phantasmagoria of a lunatic. Very often only a slight dbaissement du niveau
mental is needed to unleash this world of illusion. The terror and darkness of this
moment has its equivalent in the experiences described in the opening sections of the
Sidpa Bardo. But the contents of this Bardo also reveal the archetypes, the karmic
images which appear first in their terrifying form. The Chonyid state is equivalent to a
deliberately induced psychosis.
One often hears and reads about the dangers of yoga, particularly of the ill-reputed
Kundalini yoga. The deliberately induced psychotic state, which in certain unstable
individuals might easily lead to a real psychosis, is a danger that needs to be taken very
seriously indeed. These things really are dangerous and ought not to be meddled with
in our typically Western way. It is a meddling with fate, which strikes at the very roots
of human existence and can let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person
ever dreamed. These sufferings correspond to the hellish torments of the Chonyid state,
described in the text as follows:-
' Then the Lord of Death will place round thy neck a rope and drag thee along; he
will cut off thy head, tear out thy heart, pull out thy intestines, lick up thy brain, drink
thy blood, eat thy flesh, and gnaw thy bones; but thou wilt be incapable of dying.
Even when thy body is hacked to pieces, it will revive again. The repeated hacking
will cause intense pain and torture.'

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY xlvii
These tortures aptly describe the real nature of the danger:
it is a disintegration of the wholeness of the Bardo body, which is a kind of ' subtle
body' constituting the visible envelope of the psychic self in the after-death state. The
psychological equivalent of this dismemberment is psychic dissociation. In its
deleterious form it would be schizophrenia (split mind). This most common of all
mental illnesses consists essentially in a marked abaissement du niveau mental which
abolishes the normal checks imposed by the conscious mind and thus gives unlimited
scope to the play of the unconscious ' dominants '.
The transition, then, from the Sidpa state to the Chonyid state is a dangerous
reversal of i;he aims and intentions of the conscious mind. It is a sacrifice of the ego's
stability and a surrender to the extreme uncertainty of what must seem like a chaotic
riot of phantasmal forms. When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was ' the true
seat of anxiety ', he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. Fear of
self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously
controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength. No one who
strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is
feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self-the sub-human, or supra-human,
world of psychic ' dominants ' from which the ego originally emancipated itself with
enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory
freedom. This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking,
but it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to
find fulfilment, has still to be confronted by an object. This, at first sight, would
appear to be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose.
Here we seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we
seek and find what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all
evil and all good is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be
conquered, punished, destroyed or enjoyed. But nature herself does not allow this
paradisal stat" of innocence to continue for ever. There are, and always have been,
those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a
symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in
his own transu'bjective

xliii
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

but'. At the same time, it must be admitted that this view of the psyche is typically
Western, only it is expressed more blatantly, more plainly, and more ruthlessly than
others would have dared to express it, though at bottom they think no differently. As
to what' mind ' means in this connection, we can only cherish the hope that it will
carry conviction. But, as even Max Scheler noted with regret, the power of this ' mind'
is, to say the least of it,
doubtful.
I think, then, we can state it as a fact that with the aid of psychoanalysis the
rationalizing mind of the West has pushed forward into what one might call the
neuroticism of the Sidpa state, and has there been brought to an inevitable standstill
by the uncritical assumption that everything psychological is subjective and
personal. Even so, this advance has been a great gain, inasmuch as it has enabled us
to take one more step behind our conscious lives. This knowledge also gives us a
hint of how we ought to read the Bardo Thodol-that is, backwards. If, with the help
of our Western science, we have to some extent succeeded in understanding the
psychological character of the Sidpa Bardo, our next task is to see if we can make
anything of the preceding ChSnyid Bardo.
The Chonyid state is one of karmic illusion-that is to say, illusions which result
from the psychic residua of previous existences. According to the Eastern view,
karma implies a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of
reincarnation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supra-temporality of the
soul. Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason can keep in step with this idea.
There are too many if's and but's. Above all, we know desperately little about the
possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we
cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.
Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof
would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept
the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest
sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist-that is to say, there is inheritance of
psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special
gifts, and so forth. It does no violence to the psychic

xliv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

xlv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

assertion in Swedenborg, knowledge of his writings can hardly be sufficiently
widespread for this little bit of information to have been picked up by every small-town'
medium '. And a connection between Swedenborg's and the Bardo Thodol is completely
unthinkable. It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly
existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits-an archetypal idea which
enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. It is
significant, too, that ghosts all over the world have certain features in common. I am
naturally aware of the unverifiable spiritualistic hypothesis, though I have no wish to
make it my own. I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but
differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain
form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs of the body are not mere
lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which
assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the
psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an
extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them dominants of the unconscious. The
layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have
termed the collective unconscious.
So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine,
memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid
of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only
emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible. As
we have seen, Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be bom. (The Sidpa
Bardo is the ' Bardo of Seeking Rebirth'.) Such a state, therefore, precludes any
experience of transubjective psychic realities, unless the individual refuses categorically
to be bom back again into the world of consciousness. According to the teachings of the
Bardo Thodol, it is still possible for him, in each of the Bardo states, to reach the
Dharma-Kaya by transcending the four-faced Mount Meru, provided that he does not
yield to his desire to follow the ' dim lights'. This is as much as to say that the dead man
must desperately resist the dictates of reason, as we understand it.

xlvi
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY xlvii
These tortures aptly describe the real nature of the danger:
it is a disintegration of the wholeness of the Bardo body, which is a kind of ' subtle
body' constituting the visible envelope of the psychic self in the after-death state. The
psychological equivalent of this dismemberment is psychic dissociation. In its
deleterious form it would be schizophrenia (split mind). This most common of all
mental illnesses consists essentially in a marked abaissement du niveau mental which
abolishes the normal checks imposed by the conscious mind and thus gives unlimited
scope to the play of the unconscious ' dominants '.
The transition, then, from the Sidpa state to the Chonyid state is a dangerous
reversal of i;he aims and intentions of the conscious mind. It is a sacrifice of the ego's
stability and a surrender to the extreme uncertainty of what must seem like a chaotic
riot of phantasmal forms. When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was ' the true
seat of anxiety ', he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. Fear of
self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously
controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength. No one who
strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is
feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self-the sub-human, or supra-human,
world of psychic ' dominants ' from which the ego originally emancipated itself with
enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory
freedom. This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but
it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find
fulfilment, has still to be confronted by an object. This, at first sight, would appear to
be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose. Here we
seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find
what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good
is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished,
destroyed or enjoyed. But nature herself does not allow this paradisal stat" of
innocence to continue for ever. There are, and always have been, those who cannot
help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it
really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own
transu'bjective

xlviii PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY
reality. It is from this profound intuition, according to lamaist doctrine, that the
Chonyid state derives its true meaning, which is wliy the Chonyid Bardo is entitled'
The Bardo of the Experiencing of Reality'.
The reality experienced in the Chonyid state is, as the last section of the
corresponding Bardo teaches, the reality of thought. The ' thought-forms ' appear as
realities, fantasy takes on real form, and the terrifying dream evoked by karma and
played out by the unconscious ' dominants' begins. The first to appear (if we read the
text backwards) is the all-destroying God of Death, the epitome of all terrors; he is
followed by the 28' power-holding' and sinister goddesses and the 58 ' blood-
drinking' goddesses. In spite of their daemonic aspect, which appears as a confusing
chaos of terrifying attributes and monstrosities, a certain order is already discernible.
We find that there are companies of gods and goddesses who are arranged according
to the four directions and are distinguished by typical mystic colours. It gradually
becomes clearer that all these deities are organized into mandalas, or circles,
containing a cross of the four colours. The colours are co-ordinated with the four
aspects of wisdom:
(1) White==the light-path of the mirror-like wisdom;
(2) Yellow =the light-path of the wisdom of equality;
(3) Red = the light-path of the discriminative wisdom;
(4) Green ==the light-path of the all-performing wisdom.
On a higher level of insight, the dead man knows that the real thought-forms all
emanate from himself, and that the four light-paths of wisdom which appear before
him are the radiations of his own psychic faculties. This takes us straight to the
psychology of the lamaistic mandala, which I have already discussed in the book I
brought out with the late Richard Wilhelm, The Secret o) the Golden Flower.
Continuing our ascent backwards through the region of the Chonyid Bardo, we
come finally to the vision of the Four Great Ones: the green Amogha-Siddhi, the red
Amitabha, the yellow Ratna-Sambhava, and the white Vajra-Sattva. The ascent ends
with the effulgent blue light of the Dharma-Dhatu, the Buddha-body, which glows in
the midst of the mandala from the heart of Vairochana.
With this final vision the karmic illusions cease; consciousness,

xlix
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

weaned away from all form and from all attachment to objects, returns to the
timeless, inchoate state of the Dharma-Kdya. Thus (reading backwards) the Chikhai
state, which appeared at
the moment of death, is reached.
I think these few hints will suffice to give the attentive reader some idea of the
psychology of the Bardo Thodol. The book describes a way of initiation in reverse,
which, unlike the eschato-logical expectations oi Christianity, prepares the soul for a
descent into physical being. The thoroughly intellectualistic and rationalistic worldly-
mindedness of the European makes it advisable for us to reverse the sequence of the
Bardo Thodol and to regard it as an account of Eastern initiation experiences, though
one is perfectly free, if one chooses, to substitute Christian symbols for the gods of
the Chonyid Bardo. At any rate, the sequence of events as I have described it offers a
close parallel to the phenomenology of the European unconscious when it is
undergoing an ' initiation process ', that is to say, when it is being analyzed. The
transformation of the unconscious that occurs under analysis makes it the natural
analogue of the religious initiation ceremonies, which do, however, differ in principle
from the natural process in that they forestall the natural course of development and
substitute for the spontaneous production of symbols a deliberately selected set of
symbols prescribed by tradition. We can see this in the Exercitia of Ignatius Loyola,
or in the yoga meditations of the Buddhists and Tantrists.
The reversal of the order of the chapters, which I have suggested here as an aid to
understanding, in no way accords with the original intention of the Bardo Thodol.
Nor is the psychological use we make of it anything but a secondary intention,
though one that is possibly sanctioned by lamaist custom. The real purpose of this
singular book is the attempt, which must seem very strange to the educated European
of the twentieth century, to enlighten the dead on their journey through the regions of
the Bardo. The Catholic Church is the only place in the world of the white man
where any provision is made for the souls of the departed. Inside the Protestant camp,
with its world-affirming optimism, we only find a few mediumistic ' rescue circles',
whose main concern is to make the dead aware of the fact that they are dead. But,
generally speaking, we

xliii
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

but'. At the same time, it must be admitted that this view of the psyche is typically
Western, only it is expressed more blatantly, more plainly, and more ruthlessly than
others would have dared to express it, though at bottom they think no differently. As
to what' mind ' means in this connection, we can only cherish the hope that it will
carry conviction. But, as even Max Scheler noted with regret, the power of this ' mind'
is, to say the least of it,
doubtful.
I think, then, we can state it as a fact that with the aid of psychoanalysis the
rationalizing mind of the West has pushed forward into what one might call the
neuroticism of the Sidpa state, and has there been brought to an inevitable standstill
by the uncritical assumption that everything psychological is subjective and
personal. Even so, this advance has been a great gain, inasmuch as it has enabled us
to take one more step behind our conscious lives. This knowledge also gives us a
hint of how we ought to read the Bardo Thodol-that is, backwards. If, with the help
of our Western science, we have to some extent succeeded in understanding the
psychological character of the Sidpa Bardo, our next task is to see if we can make
anything of the preceding ChSnyid Bardo.
The Chonyid state is one of karmic illusion-that is to say, illusions which result
from the psychic residua of previous existences. According to the Eastern view,
karma implies a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of
reincarnation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supra-temporality of the
soul. Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason can keep in step with this idea.
There are too many if's and but's. Above all, we know desperately little about the
possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we
cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.
Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof
would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept
the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest
sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist-that is to say, there is inheritance of
psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special
gifts, and so forth. It does no violence to the psychic

xliv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

xlv
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMMENTARY

assertion in Swedenborg, knowledge of his writings can hardly be sufficiently
widespread for this little bit of information to have been picked up by every small-town'
medium '. And a connection between Swedenborg's and the Bardo Thodol is completely
unthinkable. It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly
existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits-an archetypal idea which
enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. It is
significant, too, that ghosts all over the world have certain features in common. I am
naturally aware of the unverifiable spiritualistic hypothesis, though I have no wish to
make it my own. I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but
differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain
form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs of the body are not mere
lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which
assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the
psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an
extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them dominants of the unconscious. The
layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have
termed the collective unconscious.
So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine,
memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid
of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only
emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible. As
we have seen, Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be bom. (The Sidpa
Bardo is the ' Bardo of Seeking Rebirth'.) Such a state, therefore, precludes any
experience of transubjective psychic realities, unless the individual refuses categorically
to be bom back again into the world of consciousness. According to the teachings of the
Bardo Thodol, it is still possible for him, in each of the Bardo states, to reach the
Dharma-Kaya by transcending the four-faced Mount Meru, provided that he does not
yield to his desire to follow the ' dim lights'. This is as much as to say that the dead man
must desperately resist the dictates of reason, as we understand it.

xlvi
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY xlvii
These tortures aptly describe the real nature of the danger:
it is a disintegration of the wholeness of the Bardo body, which is a kind of ' subtle
body' constituting the visible envelope of the psychic self in the after-death state. The
psychological equivalent of this dismemberment is psychic dissociation. In its
deleterious form it would be schizophrenia (split mind). This most common of all
mental illnesses consists essentially in a marked abaissement du niveau mental which
abolishes the normal checks imposed by the conscious mind and thus gives unlimited
scope to the play of the unconscious ' dominants '.
The transition, then, from the Sidpa state to the Chonyid state is a dangerous
reversal of i;he aims and intentions of the conscious mind. It is a sacrifice of the ego's
stability and a surrender to the extreme uncertainty of what must seem like a chaotic
riot of phantasmal forms. When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was ' the true
seat of anxiety ', he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. Fear of
self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously
controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength. No one who
strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is
feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self-the sub-human, or supra-human,
world of psychic ' dominants ' from which the ego originally emancipated itself with
enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory
freedom. This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but
it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find
fulfilment, has still to be confronted by an object. This, at first sight, would appear to
be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose. Here we
seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find
what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good
is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished,
destroyed or enjoyed. But nature herself does not allow this paradisal stat" of
innocence to continue for ever. There are, and always have been, those who cannot
help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it
really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own
transu'bjective

xlix
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

weaned away from all form and from all attachment to objects, returns to the
timeless, inchoate state of the Dharma-Kdya. Thus (reading backwards) the Chikhai
state, which appeared at
the moment of death, is reached.
I think these few hints will suffice to give the attentive reader some idea of the
psychology of the Bardo Thodol. The book describes a way of initiation in reverse,
which, unlike the eschato-logical expectations oi Christianity, prepares the soul for a
descent into physical being. The thoroughly intellectualistic and rationalistic
worldly-mindedness of the European makes it advisable for us to reverse the
sequence of the Bardo Thodol and to regard it as an account of Eastern initiation
experiences, though one is perfectly free, if one chooses, to substitute Christian
symbols for the gods of the Chonyid Bardo. At any rate, the sequence of events as I
have described it offers a close parallel to the phenomenology of the European
unconscious when it is undergoing an ' initiation process ', that is to say, when it is
being analyzed. The transformation of the unconscious that occurs under analysis
makes it the natural analogue of the religious initiation ceremonies, which do,
however, differ in principle from the natural process in that they forestall the natural
course of development and substitute for the spontaneous production of symbols a
deliberately selected set of symbols prescribed by tradition. We can see this in the
Exercitia of Ignatius Loyola, or in the yoga meditations of the Buddhists and
Tantrists.
The reversal of the order of the chapters, which I have suggested here as an aid to
understanding, in no way accords with the original intention of the Bardo Thodol.
Nor is the psychological use we make of it anything but a secondary intention,
though one that is possibly sanctioned by lamaist custom. The real purpose of this
singular book is the attempt, which must seem very strange to the educated
European of the twentieth century, to enlighten the dead on their journey through the
regions of the Bardo. The Catholic Church is the only place in the world of the
white man where any provision is made for the souls of the departed. Inside the
Protestant camp, with its world-affirming optimism, we only find a few mediumistic
' rescue circles', whose main concern is to make the dead aware of the fact that they
are dead. But, generally speaking, we

1 PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY
have nothing in the West that is in any way comparable to the Bardo Thodol,
except for certain secret writings which are inaccessible to the wider public and to the
ordinary scientist. According to tradition, the Bardo Thodol, too, seems to have been
included among the ' hidden ' books, as Dr. Evans-Wentz makes clear in his
Introduction. As such, it forms a special chapter in the magical ' cure of the soul'
which extends even beyond death. This cult of the dead is rationally based on the
belief in the supra-temporality of the soul, but its irrational basis is to be found in the
psychological need of the living to do something for the departed. This is an
elementary need which forces itself upon even the most ' enlightened' individuals
when faced by the death of relatives and friends. That is why, enlightenment or no
enlightenment, we still have all manner of ceremonies for the dead. If Lenin had to
submit to being embalmed and put on show in a sumptuous mausoleum like an
Egyptian pharaoh, we may be quite sure it was not because his followers believed in
the resurrection of the body. Apart, however, from the Masses said for the soul in the
Catholic Church, the provisions we make for the dead are rudimentary and on the
lowest level, not because we cannot convince ourselves of the soul's immortality, but
because we have rationalized the above-mentioned psychological need out of
existence. We behave as if we did not have this need, and because we cannot believe
in a life after death we prefer to do nothing about it. Simpler-minded people follow
their own feelings, and, as in Italy, build themselves funeral monuments of gruesome
beauty. The Catholic Masses for the soul are on a level considerably above this,
because they are expressly intended for the psychic welfare of the deceased and are
not a mere gratification of lachrymose sentiments. But the highest application of
spiritual effort on behalf of the departed is surely to be found in the instructions of the
Bardo Thodol. They are so detailed and thoroughly adapted to the apparent changes
in the dead man's condition that every serious-minded reader must ask himself
whether these wise old lamas might not, after all, have caught a glimpse of the fourth
dimension and twitched the veil from. the greatest of life's secrets.
If the truth is always doomed to be a disappointment, one almost feels tempted to
concede at least that much reality to the

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY li
vision of life in the Bardo. At any rate, it is unexpectedly original, if nothing else,
to find the after-death state, of which our religious imagination has formed the most
grandiose conceptions, painted in lurid colours as a terrifying dream-state of a
progressively degenerative character. The supreme vision comes not at the end of the
Bardo, but right at the beginning, in the moment of death; what happens afterward is
an ever-deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate
degradation of new physical birth. The spiritual climax is reached at the moment
when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is
possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man
to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus
to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay.
Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into
a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal. But this
eschatological goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of
the labours and aspirations of earthly existence. This view is not only lofty, it is manly
and heroic.
The degenerative character of Bardo life is corroborated by the spiritualistic
literature of the West, which again and again gives one a sickening impression of the
utter inanity and banality of communications from the ' spirit world'. The scientific
mind does not hesitate to explain these reports as emanations from the unconscious of
the ' mediums' and of those taking part in the seance, and even to extend this
explanation to the description of the Hereafter given in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And it is an undeniable fact that the whole book is created out of the archetypal
contents of the unconscious. Behind these there lie- and in this our Western reason
is quite right-no physical or metaphysical realities, but ' merely ' the reality of
psychic facts, the data of psychic experience. Now whether a thing is ' given '
subjectively or objectively, the fact remains that it is. The Bardo Thodol says no more
than this, for its five Dhyani Buddhas are themselves no more than psychic data. That
is just what the dead man has to recognize, if it has not already become clear to him
during life that his own psychic self and the giver of all data are one and the same.
The world of gods and spirits is truly

xliii
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

but'. At the same time, it must be admitted that this view of the psyche is typically
Western, only it is expressed more blatantly, more plainly, and more ruthlessly than
others would have dared to express it, though at bottom they think no differently. As
to what' mind ' means in this connection, we can only cherish the hope that it will
carry conviction. But, as even Max Scheler noted with regret, the power of this ' mind'
is, to say the least of it,
doubtful.
I think, then, we can state it as a fact that with the aid of psychoanalysis the
rationalizing mind of the West has pushed forward into what one might call the
neuroticism of the Sidpa state, and has there been brought to an inevitable standstill
by the uncritical assumption that everything psychological is subjective and
personal. Even so, this advance has been a great gain, inasmuch as it has enabled us
to take one more step behind our conscious lives. This knowledge also gives us a
hint of how we ought to read the Bardo Thodol-that is, backwards. If, with the help
of our Western science, we have to some extent succeeded in understanding the
psychological character of the Sidpa Bardo, our next task is to see if we can make
anything of the preceding ChSnyid Bardo.
The Chonyid state is one of karmic illusion-that is to say, illusions which result
from the psychic residua of previous existences. According to the Eastern view,
karma implies a sort of psychic theory of heredity based on the hypothesis of
reincarnation, which in the last resort is an hypothesis of the supra-temporality of the
soul. Neither our scientific knowledge nor our reason can keep in step with this idea.
There are too many if's and but's. Above all, we know desperately little about the
possibilities of continued existence of the individual soul after death, so little that we
cannot even conceive how anyone could prove anything at all in this respect.
Moreover, we know only too well, on epistemological grounds, that such a proof
would be just as impossible as the proof of God. Hence we may cautiously accept
the idea of karma only if we understand it as psychic heredity in the very widest
sense of the word. Psychic heredity does exist-that is to say, there is inheritance of
psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special
gifts, and so forth. It does no violence to the psychic

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assertion in Swedenborg, knowledge of his writings can hardly be sufficiently
widespread for this little bit of information to have been picked up by every small-town'
medium '. And a connection between Swedenborg's and the Bardo Thodol is completely
unthinkable. It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly
existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits-an archetypal idea which
enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. It is
significant, too, that ghosts all over the world have certain features in common. I am
naturally aware of the unverifiable spiritualistic hypothesis, though I have no wish to
make it my own. I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but
differentiated, psychic structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain
form and direction to all experience. For, just as the organs of the body are not mere
lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which
assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the
psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an
extraordinary degree. That is why I also call them dominants of the unconscious. The
layer of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have
termed the collective unconscious.
So far as I know, there is no inheritance of individual prenatal, or pre-uterine,
memories, but there are undoubtedly inherited archetypes which are, however, devoid
of content, because, to begin with, they contain no personal experiences. They only
emerge into consciousness when personal experiences have rendered them visible. As
we have seen, Sidpa psychology consists in wanting to live and to be bom. (The Sidpa
Bardo is the ' Bardo of Seeking Rebirth'.) Such a state, therefore, precludes any
experience of transubjective psychic realities, unless the individual refuses categorically
to be bom back again into the world of consciousness. According to the teachings of the
Bardo Thodol, it is still possible for him, in each of the Bardo states, to reach the
Dharma-Kaya by transcending the four-faced Mount Meru, provided that he does not
yield to his desire to follow the ' dim lights'. This is as much as to say that the dead man
must desperately resist the dictates of reason, as we understand it.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY xlvii
These tortures aptly describe the real nature of the danger:
it is a disintegration of the wholeness of the Bardo body, which is a kind of ' subtle
body' constituting the visible envelope of the psychic self in the after-death state. The
psychological equivalent of this dismemberment is psychic dissociation. In its
deleterious form it would be schizophrenia (split mind). This most common of all
mental illnesses consists essentially in a marked abaissement du niveau mental which
abolishes the normal checks imposed by the conscious mind and thus gives unlimited
scope to the play of the unconscious ' dominants '.
The transition, then, from the Sidpa state to the Chonyid state is a dangerous
reversal of i;he aims and intentions of the conscious mind. It is a sacrifice of the ego's
stability and a surrender to the extreme uncertainty of what must seem like a chaotic
riot of phantasmal forms. When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was ' the true
seat of anxiety ', he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. Fear of
self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously
controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength. No one who
strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is
feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self-the sub-human, or supra-human,
world of psychic ' dominants ' from which the ego originally emancipated itself with
enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory
freedom. This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but
it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find
fulfilment, has still to be confronted by an object. This, at first sight, would appear to
be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose. Here we
seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find
what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good
is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished,
destroyed or enjoyed. But nature herself does not allow this paradisal stat" of
innocence to continue for ever. There are, and always have been, those who cannot
help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it
really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own
transu'bjective

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weaned away from all form and from all attachment to objects, returns to the
timeless, inchoate state of the Dharma-Kdya. Thus (reading backwards) the Chikhai
state, which appeared at
the moment of death, is reached.
I think these few hints will suffice to give the attentive reader some idea of the
psychology of the Bardo Thodol. The book describes a way of initiation in reverse,
which, unlike the eschato-logical expectations oi Christianity, prepares the soul for a
descent into physical being. The thoroughly intellectualistic and rationalistic
worldly-mindedness of the European makes it advisable for us to reverse the
sequence of the Bardo Thodol and to regard it as an account of Eastern initiation
experiences, though one is perfectly free, if one chooses, to substitute Christian
symbols for the gods of the Chonyid Bardo. At any rate, the sequence of events as I
have described it offers a close parallel to the phenomenology of the European
unconscious when it is undergoing an ' initiation process ', that is to say, when it is
being analyzed. The transformation of the unconscious that occurs under analysis
makes it the natural analogue of the religious initiation ceremonies, which do,
however, differ in principle from the natural process in that they forestall the natural
course of development and substitute for the spontaneous production of symbols a
deliberately selected set of symbols prescribed by tradition. We can see this in the
Exercitia of Ignatius Loyola, or in the yoga meditations of the Buddhists and
Tantrists.
The reversal of the order of the chapters, which I have suggested here as an aid to
understanding, in no way accords with the original intention of the Bardo Thodol.
Nor is the psychological use we make of it anything but a secondary intention,
though one that is possibly sanctioned by lamaist custom. The real purpose of this
singular book is the attempt, which must seem very strange to the educated
European of the twentieth century, to enlighten the dead on their journey through the
regions of the Bardo. The Catholic Church is the only place in the world of the
white man where any provision is made for the souls of the departed. Inside the
Protestant camp, with its world-affirming optimism, we only find a few mediumistic
' rescue circles', whose main concern is to make the dead aware of the fact that they
are dead. But, generally speaking, we

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY li
vision of life in the Bardo. At any rate, it is unexpectedly original, if nothing else,
to find the after-death state, of which our religious imagination has formed the most
grandiose conceptions, painted in lurid colours as a terrifying dream-state of a
progressively degenerative character. The supreme vision comes not at the end of the
Bardo, but right at the beginning, in the moment of death; what happens afterward is
an ever-deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate
degradation of new physical birth. The spiritual climax is reached at the moment
when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is
possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man
to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus
to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay.
Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into
a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal. But this
eschatological goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of
the labours and aspirations of earthly existence. This view is not only lofty, it is
manly and heroic.
The degenerative character of Bardo life is corroborated by the spiritualistic
literature of the West, which again and again gives one a sickening impression of the
utter inanity and banality of communications from the ' spirit world'. The scientific
mind does not hesitate to explain these reports as emanations from the unconscious of
the ' mediums' and of those taking part in the seance, and even to extend this
explanation to the description of the Hereafter given in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And it is an undeniable fact that the whole book is created out of the archetypal
contents of the unconscious. Behind these there lie- and in this our Western reason
is quite right-no physical or metaphysical realities, but ' merely ' the reality of
psychic facts, the data of psychic experience. Now whether a thing is ' given '
subjectively or objectively, the fact remains that it is. The Bardo Thodol says no more
than this, for its five Dhyani Buddhas are themselves no more than psychic data. That
is just what the dead man has to recognize, if it has not already become clear to him
during life that his own psychic self and the giver of all data are one and the same.
The world of gods and spirits is truly

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' nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me. To turn this sentence round so
that it reads: The collective unconscious is the world of gods and spirits outside me,
no intellectual acrobatics are needed, but a whole human lifetime, perhaps even many
lifetimes of increasing completeness. Notice that I do not say ' of increasing perfection
', because those who are ' perfect' make another kind of discovery altogether. * *
*
The Bardo Thodol began by being a ' closed ' book, and so it has remained, no
matter what kind of commentaries may be written upon it. For it is a book that will
only open itself to spiritual understanding, and this is a capacity which no man is bom
with, but which he can only acquire through special training and special experience. It
is good that such to all intents and purposes ' useless ' books exist. They are meant for
those ' queer folk ' who no longer set much store by the uses, aims, and meaning of
present-day ' civilisation '.