It's interesting to see that there are more than 200 buddhist books in jung's study today — an old swiss man who has been eating these old oriental books since the 1910s and who has been reading letters for 30 years with master zheng zeng suzuki of japan. In the psychoanalytical circles at the time, it's kind of "bad business."。
But now, looking back, jung may have touched something that was not noticed by his peers. The harvard medical school's brain imaging study in 2018 was an interesting footnote: eight weeks of introspection, which thickened the frontal cortex responsible for emotional regulation, while the almonds that reacted to the pressure of the tube gave the "shrunk." it's like taking antidepressants, but you don't have to put up with dry insomnia。
This "oriental technology western validation" road is now getting wider and wider. The university of oxford's positive cognitive therapy (mbct) has combined buddhist introspective and cognitive behaviour therapy, which can reduce the incidence of depression by half. The acceptance of the promise therapy (act) moved directly from the buddhist concept of "no adherence" to the dbt concept. According to the 2022 report of the american psychological society, the effectiveness of such combination therapy for mild moderate depression ranges from 72 to 85 per cent. Cambridge university is much more economical, with a direct estimate of 20 minutes per day to observe and practice the equivalent of a low dose of ssri-type drugs — of course, it's mainly for evidence-based people, and it's so depressing that they have to take them。
The world health organization (who) has included regular schooling in its anti-depressive treatment programme, which is official。
In particular, jung spoke of the book of laws, which became the core of the subject "conception" at ucla. On average, after learning, negative thinking is less than 40 per cent. It's not amazing, but it's going to last — unlike some quick fixes, and it bounces back。
The metaphor of "lines and snakes" is common in buddha's scriptures: in the dark, the rope is mistook as a snake, scared to death, and a false alarm comes out at the light. Modern neuroscience adds a new explanation to this old story -- this is a symptom of overactivity in the default mode network of the brain, which can be five to seven times more sensitive to the threat recognition system of a depressed person than normal people. The effect of the exercise is to reload the system。
The oxc has made the observation exercise a standardized product: five minutes per day for the first two weeks, 10 minutes for the third week and 15 minutes from the fourth week. After eight weeks, three quarters of the population experienced a marked improvement in depression. The data looks pretty neat, but there must have been three days of fishing and two days of sunning in practice, and there's been one half of it thinking, "this is useless to me" -- that's the noise of the real world。
The brain map of long-term builders is more interesting: alpha wave enhancement means easier to relax, gamma wave synchronization means greater cognitive integration, and the decline in default mode network activity directly corresponds to "less thoughtless." these changes are cumulatively, presumably, the projection at the nerve level of the "fiction of consciousness itself" that jung said。
In his memoirs, he wrote that the greatest achievement of buddhist psychology was the discovery of the illusory nature of the consciousness itself, which opened a whole new dimension to psychotherapy. This sentence is now read like a summary of today's brain science 100 years early。
Of course, it's dangerous to put all hope on "look and breathe." depression is a complex thing, with people needing drugs, people need to talk, people need to change living conditions, people need more than that. It's just a tool in a toolbox. It's more useful if you can use it or change it if you don't. Jung probably thought so, too, when he studied buddhism, but did not become a buddhist; he learned from the east, but always spoke on his own land。
This attitude of openness and retention may be a prerequisite for the true integration of east-west wisdom。
