It is astonishing to compare the ancient eastern texts with modern psychology, noting the gap of more than twenty centuries and the diffuse notion that the latter has revolutionized the understanding of man. Modern psychology—scientific, materialistic—limits itself to analyzing a reduced dimension of man, and if we summarize its achievements, we will say that it was responsible for creating and disseminating the idea of an inferior human model. In the Eastern texts, so ancient—and who knows when the tradition dates back to?—the human psychology is presented in a complexity that escapes to modern psychology: man is painted with a much larger dimension. All this for a very simple reason: the ancient Eastern texts were written by wise men who took their masters as a model; modern psychology is written by psychologists and psychiatrists who take their patients as a model. This is why we find in the former a vocabulary full of purification techniques, and in the latter, full of mental diseases.
Tag: psychology
A Psychology That Submits the Unconscious to External Stimuli
A psychology that submits the unconscious—and consequently the personality—to exclusively external stimuli may even be effective and applicable to the common man, but it will never be appropriate to the higher human model. Herein lies a clear limitation of psychoanalysis. It is true that experience, environment and the rest leave marks, but these may be minute compared to those of reasoning in the mind that has learned to disregard the exterior and has specialized in thinking. In this case, a dividing line is drawn between its early years and the moment when it discovered its own faculty. Having discovered it, it starts to exercise it in a meticulous behavioral analysis, which it judges to validate or invalidate what motivates its action. Then, it operates a remodeling—or improvement—of its own personality, in which internal stimuli begin to occupy the unconscious. The summary: the being frees himself from psychological chains—in case there are any—and builds himself up, becoming who he deliberately wants to be. To search in the past for justifications for the behavior of such a being, taking away his responsibility to act as he does or to be as he is, is to show oneself absolutely incapable of understanding him.
The Ever Corrupting and Oppressive Effects of Group Psychology
Analyzing the ever corrupting and oppressive effects of group psychology, one can conclude that honor requires solitude—that is, a flat refusal to join any collectivity. Collective thinking is detestable, the collective imposition on the individual infamous. But the path is a thankless one: there is always a price to pay. Society, with its shameful history of persecuting solitary rebels, denying them the possibility of refusal, always subjecting them to its vile tyranny, cannot be better defined than as the spreading manifestation of evil. It would not surprise to discover that those who rule this world put dead people to wake up inside the coffin.
Old Age, Disease and Death…
Old age, disease, and death; old age, disease, and death: the obsessions that paved the Buddha’s path to “enlightenment.” More than open eyes, it takes courage to confront them. Buddha understood that thought is worth nothing if it does not incur in action: from reasoning, he drew philosophy, and philosophy guided his conduct. Old age, disease, and death: everything that lives is condemned to torment, exhaustion, and suppression. The mind always wants to deceive itself; so let it suffer, let it daily embitter the conclusions of its judgment, until it has all to the last illusion torn from it! And thus, teaches the shrewd and enlightened psychologist, one escapes from the evil cycle that always results in suffering and destruction.