PSI Annual Journal 2000

Dr. Guido Majno, Chair of the Pathology Department at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, has done extensive research into the healing practices of many cultures going back into history. After a lot of investigation, he has concluded that there is no doubt that, had he been living 2000 years ago and had he been sick, he would have much preferred to find himself in India where he could be treated with aryuvedic medicine. He finds this medicine the most sensible, least invasive. That it was founded on the same philosophical basis as the masterful tradition of yoga is for me a confirmation of the ability of this tradition to deal powerfully both in the realm of the body and in the realm of the spirit.

I' ll leave aryuvedic medicine with Guido Majno, but I wish to give a nod of recognition and appreciation to this Eastern tradition which has so affected our growing awareness of the wholeness of health and the spiritual aspects of healing. I will focus not so much on that tradition, per se, but rather on the way in which several of its salient aspects can be and are being incorporated into Western healing traditions today. Just as the Transcendentalists rocked the thinking of their time by the incorporation of their reading of the Upanishads into current Western thought, so the influx of thought from the East is, as far as I can tell, behind most of the exciting growth in the medical and psychological sciences today.

The psychologist Carl Jung recognized this contribution of Eastern thought as he delved into it with his good friend Richard Wilhelm, translator of the I Ching. As Jung put it:

When the primitive world disintegrated into spirit and nature, the West rescued nature for itself. It was prone to a belief in nature, and only became the more entangled in it with every painful effort to make itself spiritual. The East, on the contrary, took mind for its own, and by explaining away matter as mere illusion (maya), continued to dream in Asiatic filth and misery. But since there is only one earth and one mankind, East and West cannot rend humanity into two different halves. Psychic reality exists in its original oneness, and awaits man' s advance to a level of consciousness where he no longer believes in the one part and denies the other, but recognizes both as constituent elements of one psyche. (1933, p. 191)

That, as far as I can tell, is a perfect definition of holistic healing as well as a warning of the kinds of dangers you get into when spirit (mind) and matter are separated too far in your approach to healing.

It was no accident that Jung looked to the East, for he saw the psychic devastation that occurred in his patients of who they were. He saw the lack of authentic religious experience in his patients and their groping for a grounded, full sense of themselves which would provide both a sense of identity and a sense of purpose in their lives. He put this psychological need of theirs into traditional theological language when he made his famous statement:

Among all my patients in the second half of life – this is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that everyone of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. (1933, p.229)

Whatever you take "religious outlook" to mean for you, I think Jung' s attempt to make the psychological disciplines of the West adequate to the human search for meaning led him to the East. As he said, "Psychoanalysis itself and the lines of thought to which it gives rise—surely a distinctly Western development—are only a beginner' s attempt compared to what is an immemorial art in the East" (1933, p.216)

Jung felt strongly that these insights of the East have to develop Western forms, just as psychic factors have to be differentiated and then integrated. Dancing Hari Krishnas in the street was to him not as integration:

It seems to be quite true that the East is at the bottom of the spiritual change we are passing through today. Only this East is not a Tibetan monastery full of Mahatmas, but in a sense lies within us. It is from the depths of our own psychic life that new spiritual forms will arise; they will be expressions of psychic forces which may help to subdue the boundless lust for prey of Aryan man. We shall perhaps come to know something of that circumscription of life which has grown in the East to a dubious quietism; also something of that stability which human existence acquires when the claims of the spirit become as imperative as the necessities of social life. Yet in this age of Americanization we are still far from anything of the sort, and it seems to me that we are only at the threshold of a new spiritual epoch. (1933, p.217)

I' ve used Jung a bit because I feel that he was prescient in his wish to combine West and East in one psychic whole, which now we see blossoming into holistic health. I' ve used him because he so earnestly sought to integrate East and West into a viable whole.

And so do we need to do this, too. And I feel that there is a very compelling reason to do so. In psychology, this reason is put most succinctly for me by Dr. Haridas Chauduri, Director of the Institute of Asian Studies in San Francisco and a student of the great Indian teacher Sri Aurobindo. He puts it thus: "Hindus have developed their psychology mainly in the course of religious unfoldment. The Western psychoanalysts – Charcot, Janet, Freud, Adler, Jung, and others – began their research in abnormal states of mind." (p. 18)

To put this another way, what used to be called in the West the doctrine of man, the doctrine of humanity, the question of who on earth we all are in essence, is in today' s world not defined by the church but rather by the psychological theories of personality. Their basic assumptions are the assumptions by which we define ourselves. And in the West many of these theories of personality, especially the early ones which so influenced later thought, are based upon work with very disturbed individuals. In India, on the contrary, psychological theory developed from the intense looking within of healthy people. And what they found is summed up by Swami Akhilananda, a student of the great Indian teacher Ramakrishna:

All the great yogis of India testify that on gaining the highest kind of mystic realization one makes an immediate experiential contact with the ultimate reality designated here as Being. (p.223) When meditation leads on to a deeper self-realization, the supreme truth dawns upon the mind that one' s own authentic Self is the master key to the essential structure of the universe and to the mystery of the Being, the ontological root, of the universe. So the ancient sages of India were convinced that the search for the supreme truth or for the mystery of the universe must assume the form of the search for one' s own true self. ‘Realize the Self' was the proclaimed motto of life. The process of the psychological self-inquiry, dauntless adventure in the domains of the psyche, was easily established as the foundation for all philosophical disciplines…(p.234)

Jung makes a very similar point on behalf of the worth of the individual. He ties the individual psyche into the universe in this matter: the psyche contains consciousness, one of two (physical being, the other) indispensable conditions for existence. "Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world…Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophy and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being." (1957, pp. 46-7) And he continues that if the psyche is to be valued, so must the individual: "If the psyche must be granted an overriding empirical importance, so also must the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche." (p.47). What the yogis call Self, Jung calls psyche, granting it the dignity of a cosmic principle.

As Dr. Chauduri puts it, you and I are the individual foci in which the evolution of the universe is taking place.

According to this understanding of the psyche, evil and pain are the result of ignorance. Dr. Chauduri puts it thus.

The human personality, consisting of mind, intellect, memory, and ego, is designed as a practically useful apparatus for participation in the world. But spiritually speaking, these psychic functions impose restrictions on the spirit, and obstruct its authentic self-awareness. The root cause of all human suffering is the individual' s alienation from his own true self or spiritual essence, and false identifications with the different functions and modes of expression of nature. (p.240)

Who of us has not seen the struggles of ourselves and friends and perhaps patients and counselors to arrive at a deeper understanding of who they are and what their purpose then in life is. Upon this deeper, more universal sense of identity, outside the narrow limits of other' s expectations and societal norms, did Jung and others base their therapies. Upon the resulting sense of purpose in life did others like Viktor Frankl, base theirs.

Further, the Indian psychological tradition recognizes four states of consciousness – sleeping, dreaming, walking and superconscious. The first two correspond to what we call the unconscious. The waking state corresponds to what we would call "reality," and towards which most therapy would focus. And the fourth, the superconscious, we mostly ignore.

Now of the paths developed in India to achieve psychological healing and wholeness I am not going to speak. Different paths were developed for different temperaments, and so we have the paths of mind-control, love, knowledge, energy, and integration. That' s classic yoga. Akhilananda boils all this down to three essentials for health: the ability to concentrate, the development of a will, and the development of an ideal. Concentration is simply the necessary ability to bring out the powers of our mind to persevere in attaining what we choose. Will has to be developed in order to have integrated emotions and a sense of direction. A strong ideal dissolves conflicts in us and focuses us around a harmonizing and meaning-given center. Yoga is the experiential testing and development of that ideal. It is the experiencing of the real self of Indian psychology.

That is the gist of the Indian classical tradition of psychology. I find it a necessary part of arriving at a whole, spiritual sense of healing. I value it because of the nobility to engenders and the positive sense of purpose and meaning which lies at the heart of it. For instance, a person I knew who had been deeply influenced by this tradition achieved extraordinary success in working with adolescents who had been badly shaken by too many drugs. His first required step in therapy was for them to take up again something that they loved doing. By providing a creative, meaningful way forward, present habits could be easily left behind. For another example, Milton Erickson achieved his remarkable healings by calling forth the unknown riches within the person, by reminding them of the existence of incredible powers within that were accessible once we stopped ourselves in such a narrow way. For example, I see how students struggle in all their various ways to arrive at a sense of themselves that is greater than the constructing ones of social convention – sexual, intellectual, religious, vocational.

I find the inclusion of Indian personality theory a liberating step towards the new spiritual, full, encompassing sense of healing and wholeness which lies on the horizon for all of us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akhilananda, Swami. Hindu Psychology: Its Meaning for the West. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., London, 1948.
Chauduri, Haridas, "Yoga Psychology." Printed Transpersonal Psychologies, ed- by Charles Tart. Harper & Row, N.Y. 1975.
Jung, C.G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Harcourt Brace, NY. 1933.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2000