Psychotherapy East & West

Alan Watts

• Verlag: New World Library
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608684571
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Eastern Philosophy

Before he became a counterculture hero, Alan Watts was known as an incisive scholar of Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy. In this 1961 classic, Watts demonstrates his deep understanding of both Western psychotherapy and the Eastern spiritual philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga. He examined the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that questioned the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking synthesis, Watts asserted that the powerful insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self. When psychotherapy merely helps us adjust to social norms, Watts argued, it falls short of true liberation, while Eastern philosophy seeks our natural relation to the cosmos.

III. THE WAYS OF LIBERATION

If it is true that psychotherapy has not been seen clearly in its social context, it is also true of the Eastern ways of liberation as they have been studied and explained in the West. Almost all the modern literature on Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism treats these subjects in a void with the barest minimum of reference to the larger background of Indian or Chinese culture. One gathers, therefore, that these disciplines are exportable units like bales of rice or tea, and that Buddhism can be “taken up” anywhere at any time like baseball. It has also seemed to the West that Christianity can be exported in the same way, that it will “work” in any culture, and, if not, so much the worse for that culture. At the same time let it be said that, at least in the higher civilizations, there are no such things as “pure” cultures uncontaminated by exotic influences. Buddhism did in fact travel from India to the very different cultures of China, Tibet, Thailand, and Japan in a way that Hinduism, as a total culture, could never have traveled. But wherever there was not some parallel institution, such as Taoism in China, it was difficult to assimilate and understand. In other words, it becomes intelligible — and applicable in our own terms — when we can see its relation to the culture from which it comes. In this way we can borrow things from other cultures, but always only to the extent that they suit our own needs.

One of the blessings of easy communication between the great cultures of the world is that partisanship in religion or philosophy is ceasing to be intellectually respectable. Pure religions are as rare as pure cultures, and it is mentally crippling to suppose that there must be a number of fixed bodies of doctrine among which one must choose, where choice means accepting the system entirely or not at all. Highly organized religions always try to force such a choice because they need devoted members for their continuance. Those who rove freely through the various traditions, accepting what they can use and rejecting what they cannot, are condemned as undisciplined syncretists. But the use of one’s reason is not a lack of discipline, nor is there any important religion which is not itself a syncretism, a “growing up together” of ideas and practices of diverse origin. Time will indeed give any religious syncretism an organic unity of its own, but also a rigidity which needs to be shaken. But one of the consequences of taking Buddhism or Vedanta out of its own cultural context is, as we have seen, the supposition that it is a religion in the same sense as Christianity and with the same social function.

Thus it strikes the uninformed Westerner that Buddhism could be an alternative to Christianity: a body of metaphysical, cosmological, psychological, and moral doctrine to be believed and simply substituted for what one has believed before. It also seems that the actual practice of these ways of liberation is almost entirely a matter of one’s private life. They seem to be solitary explorations of man’s inner consciousness, presumed to be the same everywhere, and thus as applicable in California as in Bengal — the more so because they do not require membership in a church. Yet if the main function of a way of liberation is to release the individual from his “hypnosis” by certain social institutions, what is needed in California will not be quite the same as what is needed in Bengal, for the institutions differ. Like different diseases, they require different medicines.

Yet very few modern authorities on Buddhism or Vedanta seem to realize that social institutions constitute the maya, the illusion, from which they offer release. It is almost invariably assumed that Nirvana or moksha means release from the physical organism and the physical universe, an accomplishment involving powers of mind over matter that would give their possessor the omnipotence of a god. Aside, however, from some competent extrasensory perception and some imaginative use of hypnosis, no such powers have been demonstrated, though we shall have more to say about the therapeutic use of trickery.* Some discussions of liberation suggest that what is involved is not so much objective as subjective release from the physical world. In other words, it is assumed that our normal perception of the spatially and temporally extended world, and of the sense organs which transact with it, is a type of hypnotic illusion, and that anyone who acquires perfect concentration can see for himself that the spatiotemporal world is nothing but imagination. From what we know of the hypnotic state and its induction by concentration, it might be easy enough to produce the impression that this is so. If the operator can make himself invisible to the subject, why cannot he make the whole universe invisible? But I do not believe that the ways of liberation amount to anything so trivial as substituting one hypnotic state for another. We know that our perception of the world is relative to our neurological structure and the ways in which social conditioning has taught us to see. Because the latter can to some extent be changed, it means something to say that it is imaginary. But is the structure of the organism imaginary? No one can prove that it is unless he can demonstrate that it can change itself radically by other than surgical means.

All my experience of those who are proficient in the ways of liberation indicates that feats of magic or neurotechnology are quite beside the point. I have known one Zen master quite intimately, as a personal friend, and have met and talked with many others, as well as a considerable number of yogis and swamis both honest and phony. Furthermore, I have reliable friends who have studied and practiced with Zen and Yoga teachers far more extensively than I, and I have found no evidence whatsoever for any sensational achievements of this kind. If they have achieved anything at all it is of a far humbler nature and in quite a different direction, and something which strikes me as actually more impressive.

It is not within the scope of this book to present a fully documented argument for the idea that liberation is from the maya of social institutions and not of the physical world. Some evidence will be given, but I have not myself arrived at this idea by a rigorous examination of documents. It is simply a hypothesis which, to me, makes far better sense of Buddhism and Vedanta, Yoga and Taoism, than any other interpretation. The documents are often ambiguous, for what we mean by the real or physical world is obviously determined by social institutions. When Buddhist texts state that all things (dharma) are falsely imagined and without reality of their own (svabhava) this can mean (a) that the concrete physical universe does not exist, or (b) that things are relative: they have no self-existence because no one thing can be designated without relation to others, and furthermore because “thing” is a unit of description — not a natural entity. If the former interpretation is correct, the Buddhist Nirvana will be an utterly blank state of consciousness; if the latter, it will be a transformed view of the physical world, seeing that world in its full relativity. Can there be any reasonable doubt that the latter is intended?*

If, then, the maya or unreality lies not in the physical world but in the concepts or thought forms by which it is described, it is clear that maya refers to social institutions — to language and logic and their constructs — and to the way in which they modify our feeling of the world. This becomes even clearer when we look at the relation of the Indian ways of liberation to the social structure and popular cosmology of the ancient Aryan culture. The community is divided into four basic castes — Brahman (priestly), Kshatriya (military), Vaishya (mercantile), and Sudra (laboring) — in terms of which the role and identity of every individual is defined. An individual outside caste has no legal identity, and is thus regarded as a human animal rather than a human person. The four castes are, furthermore, the general classification of roles temporarily assumed by something beyond man and, indeed, beyond all classification. This is the Brahman, or Godhead, which is one and the same as the Atman, the essential Self playing each individual role. In this ancient Indian cosmology the creation of the world is thus a dramatic manifestation. The Godhead is playing at being finite; the One is pretending to be many, but in the process, in assuming each individual role, the One has, so to speak, forgotten Itself and so has become involved in unconsciousness or ignorance (avidya).

So long as this ignorance prevails, the individualized form of the Godhead, the soul or jivatman, is constantly reborn into the world, rising or falling in fortune and station according to its deeds and their consequences (karma). There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations — the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of frustrated ghosts. Until it awakens to full self-knowledge, the individual soul may undergo reincarnation for amazingly long periods of time, touching the highest possibilities of pleasure and the lowest depths of pain, going round and round upon the wheel of samsara for thousands and millions of years.

If we go back in imagination to an India entirely uninfluenced by Western ideas, and especially those of Western science, it is easy to see that this cosmology would have been something much more than a belief. It would have seemed to be a matter of fact which everyone knew to be true. It was taken for granted, and was also vouched for by the authority of the most learned men of the time, an authority just as impressive then as scientific authority is today. Without the distraction of some persuasive alternative one can know that such a cosmology is true just as one can know that the sun goes around the earth — or just as one can know that the following figure is a bear climbing a tree, without being able to see the bear:

Or is it simply a trunk with burls on it?

To the degree, then, that this cosmology was a matter of ingrained common sense, it would have been as difficult for the average Hindu to see the world otherwise as it is for us to imagine what a physicist means by curved space, or to believe him when he says that matter is not solid.

All the ways of liberation offered release from the endless cycle of reincarnation — Vedanta and Yoga through the awakening of the true Self, and Buddhism through the realization that the process of life is not happening to any subject, so that there no longer remains anyone to be reincarnated. They agreed, in other words, that the individual soul with its continued reincarnation from life to life and even from moment to moment is maya, a playful illusion. Yet all popular accounts of these doctrines, both Western and Asian, state that so long as the individual remains unliberated he will in fact continue to be reincarnated. Despite the Buddhist anatman doctrine of the unreality of the substantial ego, the Milindapanha records Nagasena’s complex efforts to convince the Greek king Menander that reincarnation can occur, without any actual soul, until at last Nirvana is attained. The vast majority of Asian Hindus and Buddhists continue to believe that reincarnation is a fact, and most Westerners adopting Vedanta or Buddhism adopt belief in reincarnation at the same time. Western Buddhists even find this belief consoling, in flat contradiction to the avowed objective of attaining release from rebirth.

It is, however, logical to retain the belief in reincarnation as a fact if one also believes that maya is the physical world as distinct from ideas about the physical world. That is to say, one will continue to believe in this Indian cosmology until one realizes that it is a social institution. I wish, therefore, to commend what to many students of these doctrines may seem to be a startling thesis: that Buddhists and Vedantists who understand their own doctrines profoundly, who are in fact liberated, do not believe in reincarnation in any liberal sense. Their liberation involved, among other things, the realization that the Hindu cosmology was a myth and not a fact. It was, and remains, a liberation from being taken in by social institutions; it is not liberation from being alive. It is consistent with this view that, in India, liberation went hand in hand with renunciation of caste; the individual ceased to identify himself with his socially defined identity, his role. He underlined this ritually by abandoning family responsibilities when his sons were able to assume them, by discarding clothes, or, as in the case of the Buddhists, by donning the ocher robes which marked the criminal outcaste, and by retiring to the forests and mountains. Mahayana Buddhism later introduced the final and logical refinement — the bodhisattva who returns to society and adopts its conventions without “attachment,” who in other words plays the social game instead of taking it seriously.

If this thesis is true, why was it not stated openly, and why have the majority of Buddhists and Vedantists been allowed to go on thinking of the reincarnation cosmology as fact? There are two reasons. First, liberation is not revolution. It is not going out of one’s way to disturb the social order by casting doubt upon the conventional ideas by which people hold together. Furthermore, society is always insecure and thus hostile to anyone who challenges its conventions directly. To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the victim of other people’s anxiety requires considerable tact. Second, the whole technique of liberation requires that the individual shall find out the truth for himself. Simply to tell it is not convincing. Instead, he must be asked to experiment, to act consistently upon assumptions which he holds to be true until he finds out otherwise. The guru or teacher of liberation must therefore use all his skill to persuade the student to act upon his own delusions, for the latter will always resist any undermining of the props of his security. He teaches not by explanation, but by pointing out new ways of acting upon the student’s false assumptions until the student c...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Psychotherapy and Liberation
• II. Society and Sanity
• III. The Ways of Liberation
• IV. Through a Glass Darkly
• V. The Countergame
• VI. Invitation to the Dance
• Bibliographical References
• About the Author