☕ Cappuccino with the Unconscious
When the Buddha met Jung at Café Odeon
This week’s post is a whimsical form of active imagination—a bit of literary play I indulged in during a stretch of transition. I’m on my way home, and more regularly themed reflections and practices will return soon. For now, here’s a cappuccino-scented dialogue between two of my favorite minds: Carl Jung and the Buddha.
It was a wintery Tuesday morning in Zurich, which meant grey skies and cold clarity—the kind of atmosphere that encourages either suicide or sudden insight. The Café Odeon, naturally, leaned toward the latter. In the past, this caffeinated den had hosted Joyce, Lenin, and Einstein. Today, it welcomed Jung and Gautama.
Sitting by the window, Jung stirred his cappuccino with the intensity of a man trying to decode dreams in the foam. Gautama watched with the soft amusement of someone who had seen entire civilizations rise and fall—all from beneath a tree.
Jung looked up. “I’ve always admired your economy, Siddhartha. Four Noble Truths, an Eightfold Path. Not a single footnote.”
Gautama inclined his head. “Suffering’s cessation, Carl, needs no elaboration. It’s self-resolving.”
“Yes,” Jung agreed. “And you gave it pride of place. Your first truth: life is suffering.”
“Dukkha,” Gautama corrected gently. “Dis-ease. Dislocation. The body sags. The mind chases its tail. The lover leaves. The coffee goes cold.”
Jung raised his cup in mock horror. “Perish the thought.”
Gautama smiled. “Most mistake suffering as punishment. But you and I—we recognize it as the path, not a curse.”
Jung nodded, then paused. “The journey to Self, it seems to me, starts—always—with a crisis of consciousness. All the bits we exile and deny...”
“I met them too,” interrupted Gautama, turning his lemon water slowly on the table. “On my last night of dukkha, Mara came—lust, fear, loathing. I didn’t fight. I touched the earth.”
Jung’s eyes grew wide. “You grounded yourself in the real.”
“In the same way you told your patients to withdraw their projections and own their mess.”
“A hard sell,” Jung said after a sip. “Try telling people the thing they’re running from is the doorway through. Well—Aha! I suppose you have.”
Gautama smiled, or perhaps squinted.
For a moment, neither spoke. Zurich’s drizzle thickened outside, as though the Limmat were vaporizing into the heavens.
Jung broke the silence. “Now, your second truth, Siddhartha: the cause of suffering.”
“Tanha,” said Gautama, not unkindly. “Clinging. Attachment—to pleasure, to opinion, to identity. ‘I am this.’ ‘I am that.’ The mind grasps like a drowning man.”
Jung sighed. “Complexes. Mother-hunger. The abandoned inner child. Each one a ghost in the ego’s parlour.”
“And yet,” said Gautama, “you taught people to sit with those ghosts. Not to exorcise them.”
“While you dissolved the sufferer,” Jung said. “I dialogued with him.”
“Both roads,” said Gautama, “if walked sincerely, lead onward.”
Jung chuckled, warming his hands around the cup. “Do you ever think we’re describing the same landscape—just using different maps?”
“I think,” said the Gautama, “truth wears many coats. But underneath, it’s always the same naked truth.”
Another pause, soft and full. The clink of china. A waiter placed two glasses of water like offerings at a shrine.
“Would you like dessert?” asked Jung.
The Buddha looked amused. “Desire, Carl, is suffering.”
Jung smiled. “Yes, but chocolate torte is transcendence.”
They ordered two.
Curious what you, dear reader, think of this kind of imaginative exploration. Drop me a comment.
More from scratch soon,
Josh
I enjoyed this "conversation".
Wonderful. How beautifully written xx