Alfred Collins

Pacifica Graduate Institute, Depth Psychology, Adjunct

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I am a clinical psychologist specializing in applied psychophysiology (mindfulness, biofeedback, etc.) but with a second PhD in Indic Studies, focusing in that realm on Indian ideas and practices of the self. These two fields come together in my research work on Samkhya and Yoga spiritual psychology and how the primal assertion of "I am" (ahamkara) can be tamed.

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University of Alberta

Richard P Martin

Stanford University

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Martin van Bruinessen

Universiteit Utrecht

David Seamon

Kansas State University

James Mallinson

University of Oxford

Lorenzo Verderame

Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma

Shilpa Phadke

Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Francisco Vazquez-Garcia

Universidad de Cadiz

Robert Mayer

University of Oxford

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Papers by Alfred Collins

FROM BRAHMA TO A BLADE OF GRASS: Towards an Indian Self Psychology

Dharmamegha Samadhi and the Two Sides of Kaivalya: Toward a Yogic Theory of Culture

This essay will explore a liminal region lying between aspects of life that two orthodox Hindu sc... more This essay will explore a liminal region lying between aspects of life that two orthodox Hindu schools of thought, Sāṃkhya and Yoga, appear to keep apart, namely existence in the world of flux and suffering and the experience of release from entanglement in psychophysical reality. I will use the rubric duḥkha for the realm of suffering, and also refer to it as “World One;” and kaivalya for the experience of release that I will also call “World Two.” My aim will be to show how a paradoxical third realm, a “World Three” of culture, is opened between suffering and release (or between frustration and joy) through insight (buddhi or jñāna) that brings the worlds together precisely by sharply distinguishing them. Implicit in Yoga is a view of culture as being in essence the practice of living out enlightenment within the ordinary world, and so of transforming the everyday world of duḥkha into a realm of joy. The opposition between duḥkha and kaivalya parallels the fundamental opposition i...

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The Gita Dialogue Between Guru and Disciple: A Paradigm of Transformation of the Self

Annual of Psychoanalysis, 2007

The Mahabharata, one of the two great epics of ancient India,tells of the great civil war in the... more

The Three Selves of Indian Thought and Psychoanalysis

If speaking is through speech, if breathing is through breath, if seeing is through the eyes, if ... more

Selfhood in context: Some Indian solutions

… and social transformation in the Third …, 1986

We explore the ideas of atman and ahamkara (transcendent and contingent/familial self) in Indian ... more

Religious Experience without an Experiencer: The ‘Not I’ in Sāṃkhya and Yoga

Religions, Feb 2, 2019

Experience" is a category that seems to have developed new meaning in European thought after the ... more Experience" is a category that seems to have developed new meaning in European thought after the Enlightenment when personal inwardness took on the weight of an absent God. The inner self (including, a little later, a sub-or unconscious mind) rose to prominence about 200-300 years ago, around the time of the "Counter-Enlightenment" and Romanticism, and enjoyed a rich and long life in philosophy (including Lebensphilosophie) and religious studies, but began a steep descent under fire around 1970. The critique of "essentialism" (the claim that experience is self-validating and impervious to historical and scientific explanation or challenge) was probably the main point of attack, but there were others. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, et al.) claimed that authentic experience was difficult or impossible in the modern capitalist era. The question of the reality of the individual self to which experience happens also threatened to undermine the concept. This paper argues that the religious experience characteristic of Sām. khya and Yoga, while in some ways paralleling Romanticism and Lebensphilosophies, differs from them in one essential way. Sām. khyan/Yogic experience is not something that happens to, or in, an individual person. It does not occur to or for oneself (in the usual sense) but rather purus .ā rtha, "for the sake of [artha] an innermost consciousness/self"[purus. a] which must be distinguished from the "solitude" of "individual men" (the recipient, for William James, of religious experience) which would be called aham. kāra, or "ego assertion" in the Indian perspectives. The distinction found in European Lebensphilosophie between two kinds of experience, Erlebnis (a present-focused lived moment) and Erfahrung (a constructed, time-binding thread of life, involving memory and often constituting a story) helps to understand what is happening in Sām. khya and Yoga. The concept closest to experience in Sām. khya/Yoga is named by the Sanskrit root dr .ś-, "seeing," which is a process actualized through long meditative practice and close philosophical reasoning. The Erfahrung "story" enacted in Sām. khya/Yoga practice is a sort of dance-drama in which psychomaterial Nature (prakr. ti) reveals to her inner consciousness and possessor (purus. a) that she "is not, has nothing of her own, and does not have the quality of being an 'I'" (nāsmi na me nāham). This self exposure as "not I" apophatically reveals purus. a, and lets him shine for them both, as pure consciousness. Prakr. ti's long quest for purus. a, seeking him with the finest insight (jñāna), culminates in realization that she is not the seer in this process but the seen, and that her failure has been to assert aham ("I") rather than realize nāham, "Not I." Her meditation and insight have led to an experience which was always for an Other, though that was not recognized until the story's end. Rather like McLuhan's "the medium is the message," the nature or structure of experience in Sām. khya and Yoga is also its content, what religious experience is about in these philosophies and practices. In Western terms, we have religious experience only when we recognize what (all) experience (already) is: the unfolding story of purus .ā rtha. Experience deepens the more we see that it is not ours; the recognition of non-I, in fact, is what makes genuine experience possible at all.

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Selfhood and Context: Some Indian Solutions

Fatherson: A Self Psychology of the Archetypal Masculine

An academic directory and search engine.

The Dialectics of Individuation

Return to our lost origin may be at once the dominant quest and the chief fear of humankind. The ... more Return to our lost origin may be at once the dominant quest and the chief fear of humankind. The bittersweet theme of homecoming-an endeavor that seems as absurd to many in our fractured days as the attempt to step into the same river twice-is found in cultural traditions as diverse as the aboriginal Australian "dreamtime," the Hebrew Garden ofEden, the Chinese Tao, the Greek golden age and the Indian krta yuga. Nietzsche's "eternal return" emphasizes this theme, movies as varied as Lost Horizons, Citizetl Kane, and How Green Was My Valley derive their emotional impact from it. Depth psychologies teach that return to our Great Mother (conceptualized as primary narcissism and the good breast) is a dominant motivation in all human psychological life, not just that of children and neurotics. All of us, apparently, seek a time and a place that we have lost, and we seek it because

The Movies

Media Asia

Psychological Studies (September 2009) 54:194–201194 Salaam Slumdog! Personal and Cultural Trauma and Restitution in the Mumbai Slums

The fi lm “Slumdog Millionaire ” when viewed together with the earlier “Salaam Bombay! ” penetrat... more The fi lm “Slumdog Millionaire ” when viewed together with the earlier “Salaam Bombay! ” penetrates into the cultural psychology of urban India, revealing continuity with traditional Indian esthetic theories and commonality with psychoanalytic self psychologies. In fi lms where plot is secondary and character is everything, we are led deep into the essence of the heroes ’ feelings and learn to appreciate how being loyal to affect points the way to selfhood. Both fi lms explore the psyches of boys struggling to hold on to fundamental “blueprints ” of selfhood in the face of environments which seem to deny them any chance of fulfi llment. While “Salaam Bombay! ” presents a tragic and depressive response to the trauma and deprivation of slum life, “Slumdog Millionaire ” appears grandiose and manic. Beneath the surface, both fi lms sustain faith that these children can and will fi nd the families they need to fl ourish. While hope is deferred in “Salaam! ” it is ultimately achieved in “...

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Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts

The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 1983

Contents Seed as Food 48 Ambiguous Fluids: Milk, Poison, and Fire 53 The Danger of Fluids 5 5 Sto... more

At the Movies: The Emerald Forest

The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 1987

Selfhood and Context: Some Indian Solutions

ED254460 - Selfhood and Context: Some Indian Solutions.

The Dialectics of Individuation: Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung and the Path toward Wholeness

The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 1994

The Dialectics of Individuation Sean M. Kelly . Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung and the Path toward Wholeness . New York, Paulist Press, 1993

The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 1994

For Purusa's Sake": Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and the Metaphysics of Selfhood in Indian Thought: Part

The mankind quarterly, 1991

World Three: the Better Story

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Chapter 7 Culture in the Rg Veda: Creation, Poetry, and Thinking

The philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed to find in pre-Socratic Greek thinking a primordial "app... more The philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed to find in pre-Socratic Greek thinking a primordial "appropriation" or "event" (ereignis) of Being, a shining-forth in thought that became increasingly hidden in later Western reflection on the being of what is as a result of the growing dominance of paradigms of truth as representation and technological control. I will suggest that a similar perception can be found in the later Rg Vedic poets' reflection on the origins of their own thought, and that both trace a fall into World One and a renewal of the path to World Two. Like Heidegger, the Vedic sages sensed that a more original vision was being lost, or in danger of being lost, and that it was the province of thinking and poetizing to retrieve it. In this chapter I will look at the breakthrough to a World Two of satisfaction and Being that is recorded by the Vedic poets, and inquire how their realization nurtured a World Three cultural synthesis expressed in poetry and sacrifice. To anticipate, I find that the fundamental insight we discovered in yoga—the paradoxical unity-in-separation of matter and consciousness—is paralleled in Vedic thought and poetry in the continuity-cum-distinction between gods and inspired poets. The latter are treated, at least by the poets themselves, as men par excellence, and poetic work is viewed as paradigmatic for human life in general. While this relatedness between heaven and earth, men and gods, is hard—indeed almost impossible—to hold onto, its very vulnerability provides the motivation necessary to the work of maintaining it.

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The Transitional Worlds of Sri Adwayananda

In the ashram I had walked each morning before sunrise to bathe in the river, then stood barefoot... more In the ashram I had walked each morning before sunrise to bathe in the river, then stood barefooted on the sharp little rocks that covered the open space before the samadhis to listen to Punama sing kirtanams and to chant the guru mantram with a few other disciples—most of them older Indian followers of the guru's father. After the chanting, Gurudev offered puja to Sri Atmananda Guru, his right hand circling clockwise with the lighted camphor, then gracefully backhanding flowers and tulasi leaves onto the floor before the flame representing Atmananda's consciousness. When he had finished at the samadhis where Gurunathan and Mother were buried, Gurudev would do everything again in the little family puja room that was part of the main house. After puja came breakfast of idli or dosa on a banana leaf and, later in the morning if we were lucky, private talks with Sri Gurudev. I knew that the ashram was still there now in 2004, thirty years after, but had been told the samadhis were now installed in an ornate Hindu temple. Gurudev had passed three years before, and I had learned on-line that sand mining in the Pampa had made the river muddy and unfit for bathing. Still, I was here at last, in a rest house just a few miles downriver from Anandawadi, unwinding after flights from Anchorage to Seoul to Bombay to Cochin, and then three hours in the back seat of a taxi. The sun was going down, and I remembered standing before the samadhis, in the same evening twilight half a lifetime ago, soon after I first arrived at the ashram in October 1967. Gurudev had walked up and stood beside

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Alfred Collins

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