he later acknowledged Nirvana as complete and final emancipation, and agreed
that we can be liberated even from the collective unconscious. This was a
momentous statement for a psychoanalyst to make. If Professor Jung’s
statement is accurate, then a way from psychoanalysis to Zen Buddhism could
indeed be opened....
(cf. Meckel and Moore: 118)Just as a small child grows out of its sensory-centered world and awakens to the world
of reason, so the rational person awakens to a world beyond mere senses or reason.
This awakening is no regression to, nor a mere denial of, the senses or reason. The
limits of the senses and reason have been broken through; now, the senses and reason
come back into full and unhindered play—for they have been returned to, and thus
themselves reveal, their original, formless ground.
Psychotherapy can be a genuinely Buddhist therapy if it actually reveals this
formless self-awakening, rather than only dealing with the ordinary self’s interminable
integration of non-rational, unconscious elements. This crucial distinction should
neither be exaggerated, nor be understated.
How does this actually play itself out in our daily lives? In the discussion, Jung
spoke about how a healthy young man’s anxiety over and fear of death differs from
Jung’s own as an old man. Here is how Hisamatsu, in another discussion, described
composure unto death:
Authentic composure is not lost even when you’re turned head over heels.
That’s the way it is: Even in death you are composed. Not composure because
you’re resigned to die, but composure even unto death. Otherwise, it’s not
authentic.
People sometimes say things like they are free from life and death, or there
is no living and dying. But right now if you were on the brink of death and
you were able to remain undisturbed, that’s not freedom from life and death
at all, though it’s often misconstrued that way. If you were terminally ill, yet
able to remain calm and unshaken in your last moments, wouldn’t that be just
a matter of your mental or psychological state?
On the contrary, death itself must be composed. It’s not a matter of remaining
calm though you fear death: death itself is ‘free from all fear’ [as the Heart Sutra
states]. Saying, ‘I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid’—that’s not real freedom from
all fear. Truly be the formless self, and you are totally free of fear.
(Hisamatsu 1998:79, with revisions)More concretely, in 1957, during Hisamatsu’s visit to the United States, Albert
Stunkard (Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine) brought a friend and medical student named Alan Balsam, who was dying
of cancer, to meet Hisamatsu at his hotel in New York City. As soon as they met and
sat facing each other, here is how Dr Stunkard recalls that encounter:
JEFF SHORE 39