The Spacious Mind: Using Archetypes for Transformation Towards Wisdom

The spacious mind model combines Hindu and Buddhist philosophy on spiritual maturity with the Jungian view on psychological maturity to delineate how archetypal work can spur the development of wisdom. Both psychological and spiritual development defuse the ego's hold on reality to create a spacious mind that has contact with the spiritual Self. To explain such a transformation, this article discusses 5 parts of the mind: the ego, the conscious, the unconscious, the archetype, and the Self. The innovative features here are an integrated view of spiritual and psychological development, and the insight that archetypal work can be a mechanism for growth in both domains, because an archetype resides in the energetic plane with the Self and in the conscious mind with the ego.