The Peace of the Depth
The exceedingly weird Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco developed a particular stratification of Freudian depth psychology using, of all things, maths and symbolic logic. But the means by which he arrives at his strange visions are perhaps inconsequential before the strangeness of the vision. In the opening chapter of his book Thinking, Feeling and Being (1988), Matte-Blanco unwittingly describes the Freudian unconscious in its nondual aspect, as if he were describing the One of Advaita Vedanta:
“Of course, at certain very deep levels everybody has the peace of the depth. The following characteristics of the unconscious belong to this rather deep stratum: absence of contradiction — a set which contains all affirmations and their corresponding negation, if symmetrized, results in any assertion being equal to its negation: no possibility of contradiction; identity of psychical and external reality, for the same reason. The deepest strata — their mathematical limit: indivisibility. From this point ‘downwards’ the amount of symmetrization is so great that thinking, which requires asymmetrical relations, is greatly impaired. The conceptual end is the pure indivisible mode, where everything is everything else, and where the relations between things are all theoretically contained in any single thing which the intellect can grasp. The endless number of things tend to become, mysteriously, only one thing.”
Could not this strange “peace of the depth” be the famous tranquil feelings of so-called enlightenment—if not nirvana itself? Could it not be that profound sense of calm reported by mystics and that often comes laden with occult knowledge—that which is called the noetic? So that, as Freud suggests in his last note, mystical experience is precisely the conscious awareness of the structure of the unconscious? What if this glimpsed structure of the unconscious is what the buddhists mean by emptiness?
