Dear Charles,
I was impressed with your eloquent,
logical, patient, firm, and kind letter to Edward. I think you hit the nail on the head when you
talked about the emotional nature of his work.
I also found your criticism of Marxist language interesting. I’ve often felt that the English liberal
intelligentsia was doing itself a serious disservice by hanging on to that
dated terminology. I think that not only
is the language of the left caught up in Victorian concepts but the language of
the psychological world is also rooted in late Victorian concepts. Freud ‘discovered’ the Unconscious and a
therapy developed that is based almost solely on the idea that suffering comes
from repression. Remove the repression
and you’re OK. Or in the language of the
Sixties, “If it feels good do it.”
It does feel good to release pent up
emotion. You get your ‘peak experience,’ your ‘breakthrough.’ And this is ‘transformational.’ True, the language was updated by the
Americans in the Sixties and Seventies but the concepts were not. I wouldn’t argue against therapy as you know,
but as it is conceived in the West it suffers from an inability to look beyond
symptoms into root causes. It is almost
wholly centered on the conscious experience of the ego, and has become a ‘feel
good’ therapy. But this ‘feel good’
state is like the transitory subjective change that follows a shot of heroin or
a vaginal orgasm. The obstacle, the
repression, returns and one is confronted with the same sense of unease again,
owing to the nature of the Unconscious... which doesn’t care if you’re hard
core addict or a nice middle class therapist.
Quite unconnected to this argument
with Edward, on my morning walks around the mountain, I’ve been thinking about
the idea of therapy in light of Vedic ideas of the nature of the mind and it
seems to me that the Vedic idea of the gunas, the qualities of mind, is a much
more useful model for dealing with emotional energy… because it depersonalizes
the whole business. Vedic psychology
explains emotional dis-ease with reference to desire
and the qualities inherent in the mind.
When you don’t get what you want (or don’t want...this takes care of
fear) or can’t stand waiting for it to happen (or not to happen), you have an
emotional reaction. If your mind is
essentially tamasic, dull, you will become depressed. If your mind is essentially rajasic, active,
you will become angry.
The
way you deal with emotion in the Vedic system has nothing to do with
releasing repressed energy (since it just comes back later and you develop a
vasana for releasing repressed energy, i.e. you get stuck on your therapy, but
has everything to do with (1) looking into why you want what you want…which
opens one up to understand the psychology of the ego and (2) understanding the
mechanism that causes wants (and fears) to materialize (or not) and (3) assuming
a proven attitude (karma yoga) that effectively purges the unconscious of the causes of emotional dis-ease. And this understanding is completely
impersonal, applying to everyone at every level.
The Veda does not counsel analysis
of the past, the childhood, for example.
Leave mom and pop and the society out of it, it says. Follow dharma and you will be psychologically
healthy. The West, which refuses to
address desire, says get what you want and you will be happy... which we know
is patently untrue. Buddha’s whole
spiritual system was based on the idea that desire was the cause of
suffering. Desire is universal and the
solution, follow dharma, is also universal.
In the West everything is personal.
You are thought to be this specific person, born into a specific
environment, nothing more than the sum of your personal experiences. Your mom did this and your dad did that and
you lost your brother in the war and therefore you are a flawed human being. But the Veda says that you are pure and
perfect from the get-go, but if you can’t see that…if you take yourself to be a
flawed person…you can correct yourself by following a certain way of life…a
life based on principle and the recognition of universal values, not on
passion. The Buddha too came up with a
certain lifestyle: the eightfold path.
What’s behind the prescription…following dharma…is the impersonal world
of Reality, the Self, some call it God.
And unless you’ve been opened to that and understood it for what it is
(quite apart from the conceptual, relative you), you remain imprisoned in your
relative self. As far as I know there
is virtually no discussion in the Western psychological world about
desire. The reason, I think is because
the ego is just one’s fears and desires.
You attack desire and you attack ego.
This can’t be because who will be left if the ego is dismissed? No more greedy consumers, no more therapy, no
more ‘life as we know it.’
In the Bhagavad Gita it says, “Let
not the wise unsettle the minds of the ignorant.” I generally don’t do things I will regret and
almost never regret the things I do, but I did have a twinge of regret for
sending that letter to Edward without taking care to see that he couldn’t take
it personally. I should have known from
his attack on you that he did not really grasp the idea of the non-conceptual
experiential universal Self. Although he
must have experienced the absolute, not only in his therapeutic work, but in
his personal life, in so far as he lives very intensely from what I can gather,
he seems not to have recognized what it is.
I can only speculate on the reason but I’ve found that when you are
focusing on releasing pain and enjoying the subsequent bliss you are not
generally in a dispassionate state of mind. The intellect is submerged in the
experience of bliss and is not alert enough to understand where the bliss comes
from and follow it to its source. I do
remember one statement he made in the letter to me that made me realize that he
hadn’t recognized the non-conceptual. He
said that I was arguing for a ‘deeper awareness’ (which is true from one point
of view) but I could tell that he thought that that awareness was something
that might belong to an ego. Of course
we know that it doesn’t. It is the
nature of the Self. No matter how ‘deep’
one’s ego consciousness is, it is always shallow and personal…and existentially
unsatisfactory. This was the idea behind
my argument that therapy, as it is conceived in the West, is just another prison,
based on what might be called the myth of freedom.
Anyway it was very good to get your
letter which was more or less a summary of many years of inquiry and, as far as
I can see, right on the money. I admire the persistent and straightforward way
you’ve followed your path. At some
level I was sure that this was how it was for you but it was good to see it in
black and white. I’ve always felt that
enlightenment is only half a loaf if one can’t express it clearly.
As for me, I’ve been excellent. I’ve pretty much come to the end of my
‘spiritual’ life, I think.
Most of the people I’ve been working
with spiritually over the years no longer need assistance and I’ve been uninclined to take on anybody else although another fellow
popped into my energy bubble the other day and I realized that the Lord was not
letting me off the hook so easily. I
feel like I’ve achieved everything I’ve been sent to earth to achieve and am
sunk in an ever-deepening spirit of dispassion and renunciation. I look at these things that I’ve done, that
are supposed to represent ‘me’ and they barely register on my consciousness, as
if they belonged to someone from a different world. For a long time, over thirty years, I’ve felt
that the only truly interesting event to come was death, but that was never an
issue until recently. I can now see the
end, how it is shaping everything that is happening in the present, and I
welcome it.
Love,
Ram