in response to jim
"from "purity of heart," thanissaro bhikkhu...
https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Purity-of-Heart.pdfRomantic ideas about religion alive in the West (...) have shaped humanistic
psychology and—through humanistic psychology—the expectations many
Americans bring to the Dharma.
However, when we compare these expectations with the original principles of
the Dharma, we find radical differences. The contrast between them is especially
strong around the three most central issues of spiritual life: What is the essence of
religious experience? What is the basic illness that religious experience can cure?
And what does it mean to be cured?
The nature of religious experience. For humanistic psychology, as for the
Romantics, religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of
objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer
divisions. These experiences come in two sorts: peak experiences, in which the
sense of oneness breaks through divisions and dualities; and plateau experiences,
where—through training—the sense of oneness creates as healthy sense of self,
informing all of one’s activities in everyday life.
However, the Dharma as expounded in its earliest records places training in
oneness and a healthy sense of self prior to the most dramatic religious
experiences. A healthy sense of self is fostered through training in generosity and
virtue. A sense of oneness—peak or plateau—is attained in mundane levels of
concentration (jhana) that constitute the path, rather than the goal of practice.
The ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is
described, not in terms of feeling, but of knowledge: skillful mastery of the
principles of causality underlying actions and their results, followed by direct
knowledge of the dimension beyond causality where all suffering stops.
The basic spiritual illness. Romantic/humanistic psychology states that the root
of suffering is a sense of divided self, which creates not only inner boundaries—
between reason and emotion, body and mind, ego and shadow—but also outer
ones, separating us from other people and from nature and the cosmos as a
whole. The Dharma, however, teaches that the essence of suffering is clinging,
and that the most basic form of clinging is self‐identification, regardless of
whether one’s sense of self is finite or infinite, fluid or static, unitary or not.
The successful spiritual cure. Romantic/humanistic psychology maintains that a
total, final cure is unattainable. Instead, the cure is an ongoing process of
personal integration. The enlightened person is marked by an enlarged, fluid
sense of self, unencumbered by moral rigidity. Guided primarily by what feels
right in the context of interconnectedness, one negotiates with ease—like a
dancer—the roles and rhythms of life. Having learned the creative answer to the
question, “What is my true identity?”, one is freed from the need for certainties
about any of life’s other mysteries.
The Dharma, however, teaches that full Awakening achieves a total cure,
opening to the unconditioned beyond time and space, at which point the task is
done. The awakened person then follows a path “that can’t be traced,” but is
incapable of transgressing the basic principles of morality. Such a person realizes
that the question, “What is my true identity?” was ill‐conceived, and knows from
direct experience the total release from time and space that will happen at death.
When these two traditions are compared point‐by‐point, it’s obvious that—
from the perspective of early Buddhism—Romantic/humanistic psychology gives
only a partial and limited view of the potentials of spiritual practice. This means
that Buddhist Romanticism, in translating the Dharma into Romantic principles,
gives only a partial and limited view of what Buddhism has to offer.
