Tantric Buddhism and Altered States of Consciousness

Durkheim, Emotional Energy and Visions of the Consort

Louise Child

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138270404
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317046776
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores the role of altered states of consciousness in the communication of social and emotional energies, both on a societal level and between individual persons. Drawing from an original reading of Durkheimian social theorists (including Mauss, Hertz, and Hubert) and Jungian psychology, Louise Child applies this analysis to tantric Buddhist ritual and biographical material. She suggests ways in which dreams and visionary experiences (including those related to the 'subtle body') play an important and previously under-explored role in tantric understandings of the consort relationship.

Chapter 1Altered States of Consciousness, Symbols, and Social Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315611853-1

How can Durkheim's theory of collective consciousness and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious contribute to the study of dreams and visionary experiences? This is one of the primary questions that this book investigates, and in so doing it asserts that there is something social about altered states of consciousness that should be re-examined. However, I am not suggesting that one should equate ‘the social’ with economic and political structures and then apply this somewhat limited definition to an analysis of religious experience. Rather, this book argues that the psychological and social structures proposed by Jung and Durkheim are fluid and dynamic, being complicated by the presence of social and emotional energies that give vitality to the person and society, but which also give rise to tensions, conflict, and uncertainty.

Taking these insights as a starting point, I go on to suggest their implications for the study of personal emotions and relationships, drawing from ritual and biographical material generated by tantric Buddhism. This material contains a number of features that render it particularly useful for this study, partly because tantra explores the idea of ritual and religious relationships that are erotically charged, but also because it contains a wealth of references to altered states of consciousness, and a second theme that runs throughout this book is an attempt to suggest links between consort relationships and dreams and visions that may provide avenues for further investigations. Specifically it explores the links between religious symbols, visionary experiences and the transmission of emotional energies that may take place between an individual and society, within the individual psyche, and between persons.

Scholars such as Samuel have argued that the relationship between social and individuated being can be understood in terms of a tension between them (Samuel, 1990: 30). He suggests that ‘visionary states’ mediate this tension, by breaking previous thought patterns and social links, and creating new ones (Samuel, 1990: 108). An exploration of Durkheim's theory of collective consciousness and Jung's collective unconscious can support such statements and open up this area of inquiry to an analysis of levels of communication, which I suggest are closely related to both the generation, and contents of, a number of dream, vision, and trance experiences. I will argue that, for Durkheim and Jung, contact between persons goes beyond the confines of language, and is rooted, more precisely, in subtle senses and emotions that interact with the conscious mind through symbols. This suggests a dynamic conception of both society and the individual, animated by the tension between them. Because this tension is also thought to penetrate ‘the person’, the theories of Durkheim and Jung can also offer a ‘depth’ perspective to the study of identity that contrasts with sociological, anthropological, and psychological explanations of ‘altered states of consciousness’ that are more limited by their perspectives on what constitutes society and the individual. One example is Lewis, who suggests that possession trance is primarily a form of social protest (albeit one not always subject to conscious control), utilized by oppressed groups, especially women (Lewis, 1978: 85). Explanations of possession trance that reduce the phenomenon to a series of external circumstances, such as poverty, marginal social status, or an excess of unsatisfied sexual desires, avoid a confrontation with indigenous explanations, while at the same time they suggest a restricted notion of the person.

Keller (2002) notes a number of these problems in her analysis of scholarly approaches to possession trance, an analysis that both draws from, and critiques certain aspects of, postcolonial and gender theories. She suggests that

possessed bodies are extremely different from the contemporary Western model of proper subjectivity. They are volatile bodies that attract the eye of observers, and often their volatility is related to erotic or outrageous activity. Possessed bodies are not individual bodies … an ancestor, deity, or spirit had overcome them; however that is an interpretation that would be difficult if not impossible for most scholars to represent as the “truth” of the matter. By and large, scholarly approaches to possessed bodies have reinterpreted them as repressed psychological bodies, oppressed sociological bodies, or oppressed women's bodies. (Keller, 2002: vii)

While the focus of Keller's interest is on studies of possession trance, her insights have broader implications, especially for questions concerning agency, identity, and consciousness. She suggests, for example, that one of the reasons that academic examinations of spirit possession have proved to be problematic is the ‘blotting’ of consciousness during possessions (Keller, 2002: 4). The tendency, within a number of theoretical approaches, to equate agency with consciousness, is therefore difficult to reconcile with the accounts and explanations offered by a number of indigenous communities, which insist on an agency of ancestors, deities, and spirits (Keller, 2002: 22).

In addition, the construction and valuing of the western, male, ‘self-possessed’ agent, can help to maintain structures of power that are intended to place women and non-western peoples in a position of disadvantage (Keller, 2002: 21). The fact that possessions tend to occur predominately among women living in non-western cultures therefore compounds the problem (Keller, 2002: 2–3). Possession phenomena have been dismissed and reinterpreted as either a symptom of mental illness, or ‘subconsciously employed guises used by powerless people to acquire power that the scholar identifies as real power in contrast to religious power, such as economic gain or social status’ (Keller, 2002: 11). While feminist theories have attempted to re-evaluate possession more positively, they are nonetheless hampered by a focus on concepts such as ‘personal self worth’. Keller suggests that such notions rest uneasily with indigenous assertions that the possessed body is simply a vehicle, rather than an autonomous agent making claims to personal authority (Keller, 2002: 45). She therefore suggests that a number of sociological, psychological, and feminist interpretations have approached the enigma of possession utilizing similar devices. Essentially, they attempt to solve the problem by ignoring it. When confronted with a consciousness that is overcome, scholars translate the phenomenon into a question of beliefs (which they are often careful to state that they do not share) (Keller, 2002: 7, 29). As a result the power of deities, ancestors, and spirits (and to some extent the possession trance itself) is interpreted ‘as a symbolic power’ (Keller, 2002: 25).

Keller's insights present both a challenge and a cautionary note to scholars who wish to utilize sociological and psychological theories in the study of altered states of consciousness. However, the idea that deities have a symbolic dimension is not entirely incongruent with indigenous contexts of tantric Buddhism. It is possible to explore that aspect without reducing the entirety of the tantric Buddhist philosophy, ritual, and biographical material to a series of material or psychological problems expressing themselves through religion. Nonetheless, it is equally difficult to deny that altered states of consciousness have sociological and psychological implications. This is precisely because altered states are not simply isolated phenomena that only have an impact on the agency of the person concerned. They are, to some extent, framed and interpreted by the surrounding community.

Eliade, for example, uses this contact between the religious practitioner and the community to refute suggestions that trance states can be explained in terms of mental illness or deviant social behaviour (Eliade, 1974 [1951]: 23–6). Rather, he asserts the social origins of visions, by pointing to their conformity to traditional models and their ‘amazingly rich theoretical content’ (Eliade, 1974 [1951]: 14). In addition, he suggests that tribal societies also recognize mental illnesses, clearly distinguishing them from the behaviour of aspiring and practising shamans (Eliade, 1974 [1951]: 31). The shamanic career often engages with disturbances in the body, emotions, and consciousness, initially within the shaman, and later with members of their social group. This engagement is, however, considered powerful, not because the shaman is attributed with a solely conscious agency, but because this is combined, through ‘techniques of ecstasy’ with an identity that is permeated by visionary communications with spirits. Eliade, drawing from Durkheim, identifies this as a forceful example of the penetration of the sacred into the realm of the individual, one that transforms shamans and enables them to negotiate transformations within the social context (Eliade, 1974 [1951]: 8, 32).

Crucially, Durkheim gives the notions of ‘the social’ and ‘consciousness’ a number of different dimensions (Mellor, 1998). In addition to observable and external social structures, they are also related to qualities, penetrating the individual's inner life, which include a sense of morality, collective ideas, and emotional energy:

if collective life awakens religious thought when it rises to a certain intensity, that is so because it brings about a state of effervescence that alters the conditions of psychic activity. The vital energies become hyper-excited, the passions more intense, the sensations more powerful; there are indeed some that are produced only at this moment. Man does not recognize himself; he feels somehow transformed and in consequence transforms his surroundings. (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 425)

He therefore argues that collective consciousness does not only hold certain ideas in common, it has a sense of itself, rooted in exchanges of emotional energy, that becomes accessible to more-differentiated thought processes through the intermediary medium of symbols. He rejects the idea that his theory of religion is a restatement of historical materialism, arguing that,

in pointing out an essentially social thing in religion, I in no way mean to say that religion simply translates the material forms and immediate vital necessities into another language … collective consciousness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological base … if collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur. The product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that follow their own laws once they are born. They mutually attract one another, repel one another, fuse together, subdivide, and proliferate; and none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality. Indeed, the life thus unleashed enjoys such great independence that it sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any kind, but only for the pleasure of affirming itself. I have shown that precisely this is often true of ritual activity and mythological thought. (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 426)

Jung also stresses the dynamic and processual nature of the psyche, arguing that its symbolic contents, especially archetypes, originate in the most submerged layer of consciousness, the collective unconscious. He believes that these primordial images are rooted in intuition, being associated with ideas of energy and power because they are ‘the instinct's perception of itself’ (Jung, 1960: 136). However, archetypes are expressed, in the mythologies of gods and spirits, and in concepts of energy in the natural sciences, because, arising into the personal unconscious, they assume some distinctive form (Jung, 1960: 137). He explains that

the instincts and the archetypes together form the ‘collective unconscious’. I call it collective because, unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made up of individual and more or less unique contents but of those which are universal and of regular occurrence. (Jung, 1960: 134)

Jung therefore proposes analysing a series of dreams over a period of time, suggesting that the dreaming state lies between the conscious and unconscious realms, and its contents therefore express movement within the psyche. This movement is both spontaneous, and part of a process, which he terms individuation, whereby the psyche strives to restore the internal balance and equilibrium of the person (Jung, 1960: 289–90). However, individuation should not be confused with personal isolation. It is, rather, a harmonization between consciousness and the collective unconscious. This takes place in the unconscious mind, which acts like a mediator between the two. For example, during dreams a number of symbolic contents are presented to consciousness. The unconscious can therefore be regarded as a threshold, containing social energy. In addition, Jung presents a variety of explanatory tools which can be applied to different kinds of dreams and personal circumstances (Jung, 1960: 259). This multi-causal approach has features in common with the complex attitude to dreams in the tantric tradition. For example, he includes a serious consideration of the possibility of telepathic communication in dreams, while tantra explores their potential as tools of communication between human beings across distances of time and space (Jung, 1960: 262; Norbu, 1993: 3, 9).

These propositions about ‘communication’ will be explored in more detail in this chapter. The first section focuses on the relationship between the individual and society, through an examination of practitioners’ ritual engagement with tantric Buddhist deities. Drawing from Durkheim, I will argue that these deities can be thought of as collective representations (resembling totems) and suggest that they are therefore a focus and a repository for social energies. The second section goes on to examine the constitution of the individual, and explores the transformations, within the body and consciousness, that are related to practices of deity yoga, and the attainment, or realization of, the subtle illuminated body. The third section concludes with an exploration of consorts that suggests that there is a dynamic relationship between their depiction as symbolic representations and their human counterparts. I will argue that an exploration of altered states of consciousness has important implications for the understanding of this dynamic.

The Mandala, Totemism, and Emotional Energy

This section explores tantric practitioners’ engagements with Buddhist deities, proposing that they can be understood in terms of an exchange of emotional energy between the individual and society. I concentrate here on the mandala in the context of peaceful deities that are the focus of popular religious rituals (particularly in Tibet). Each of these deities can be employed in more sophisticated tantric rites, involving complex visualizations, accessible to committed monks and laity who have undergone specific initiations. However, they are also the focus of more popular devotional practices, such as circumambulation, where the circular movement of large numbers of people re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Altered States of Consciousness, Symbols, and Social Theory
• 2 Consciousness, Power, and Renunciation
• 3 Consorts, Myth, and Sacrifice in Hindu Tantra
• 4 Sacred Physiology, Yoga, and Death
• 5 Identity, Biography, and Shamanic Death
• 6 The Purification of Aggression
• 7 Transmission and Identity
• 8 The Subtle Body and Emotional Energy
• Bibliography
• Index