Samādhias perceptual transformation: a re-examination of Jung’s views on yoga

ABSTRACTFor Jung, yoga was a broad concept encompassing Eastern practices from many different traditions. Jung’s understanding of the Yoga Sūtras was based on the late nineteenth century yoga revival and its interpretation of the Yoga Sūtras. By that time, the Classical Yoga school had long become extinct with no pandits or adepts from existent Classical Yoga lineages. Jung incorrectly understood samādhi to be an ontological state equivalent to unconsciousness from the perspective of his own model of the psyche. In fact, samādhi implies epistemic insight and the transformation of perception. Jung’s misconstrual of samādhi as an ontological state of unconsciousness arose from the widely divergent ground separating the concepts of consciousness and ego in Jung’s model of the psyche and Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtras. While consciousness in Jung’s model is delimited to a field of awareness anchored in the ego complex, consciousness from the perspective of six orthodox Astika darśanas is the universal underlying tra...