Note from Sundari – This article discusses the advantages of psychological therapy with regards to self-inquiry and explains the differences, as well. While therapy and self-inquiry are compatible, and therapy is extremely important with regards to the preparation for self-inquiry, they are by no means the same, and the reason for this is unfolded.
“A STORY IS TIME itself, boxed and compressed. It is the briefest entertainment and simulacrum of real life, which is big and messy and requires a strange kind of endurance. The story is stylized for that flash of laughter and pain, thwarted desire and odd consummation, while life waterfalls with it—all of it—every day: prodigious, cloying, in decay.” (Michael Paterniti – The Telling Room)
Our story—who would we be, without it? Most of us have certain expectations of ourselves and our world. If we are dissatisfied with our past and have not given in to despair or depression, we still believe that a desired future outcome is possible. If only we could somehow understand ourselves and redeem our flawed past to remove the gnawing dissatisfaction that shadows us. But how do we understand ourselves and redeem the past to permanently end our quiet desperation? The big questions of life, such as who am I, why am I here, and what is this all about, have always been hard to answer.
Philosophers through the ages have talked about these questions with no definitive answers. Religions work for some of us to give a feeling of belonging to something bigger than ourselves, but neither philosophy nor religion promote self-inquiry based on a non-negatable logic of existence. Philosophy proposes theories based on the observations and personal opinions of clever people. Most religions expect you to adhere to their precepts, believe what you are told and somehow be a good person. Neither helps much if we are looking to understand our inner impulses and drives because neither philosophy nor religion offer a means of knowledge to investigate who you are or the field you live in. Only Vedanta, the science of non-dual Consciousness, is capable of this.
However, if we want to better understand our personal ‘small’ self with the aim of a happier life, the science of psychotherapy is a good place to start. It certainly is helpful in confronting the buried parts of the psyche and developing objectivity about our thoughts and feelings. Nonetheless, psychotherapy, as helpful as it can be, does not address our spiritual nature, and our disconnect with that is the root of all our problems.
A considerable proportion of those suffering from mental health issues are helped by psychotherapy to live better lives. And advances in medicine most certainly do help many mentally ill people manage their symptoms allowing greater functionality. But the problem with psychotherapy lies in its underlying premise that therapy is about redeeming our personal story. It is supposed to make us feel OK about the fact that we did not get what we wanted from whoever we consider responsible for giving it to us. If we can come to terms with our lot, it is possible that we can unburden ourselves of a lot of mental and emotional pain. This is no small thing. But does it bring happiness? A Greek philosophical term that describes a lucid state of robust equanimity is ataraxia, freedom from distress and worry characterized by the absence of pain, aponia. Does the absence of pain mean you are happy? Maybe, maybe not.
Though freedom from emotional pain is preferable to its opposite, it does not translate automatically to a permanent state of satisfaction, tranquility, imperturbability, equanimity—sustained peace of mind. It helps, but it’s not freedom from existential suffering. For this, we need more than knowing ourselves objectively and personally. We need Self-knowledge. And Self-knowledge is not about our story, it is complete freedom from it.
Psychotherapy extracts and relies on our personal story and tries to give us meaning by unraveling it for us within the context of what is considered ‘normal’ behaviour. It is not the purview of the therapist to point out, as the writer Henry Miller said, that “life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.” Life is value-neutral. When this truth hits home, many cannot cope with it and lose hope. The only value in life is you, and if you don’t know who you are, how are you going to value yourself, or evaluate anything?
Life is a zero-sum game, there is nothing to gain here. Without Self-knowledge, consciously or unconsciously, this truth slowly eats away at the mind causing depression. The dread of the existential void is a fundamental fact of human existence, one that everyone tries to run from until they can no longer do so. You are born alone, you die alone and you are alone in between. Nothing lasts, nothing can be grasped. Nobody can save us from this. The experience hungry mind knows no rest and is compelled to seek outside itself for something to end the pain. The hungry ghosts that prowl hoping for release grow ever more and ever more desperate on a spiritual starvation diet. It sounds terrible and it is, though most try to silence this uncomfortable truth by relentlessly chasing more objects. ‘Give me more, I can’t get no satisfaction’!
We live in a world now of very strange extremes. On the one hand, we have the conspiracy theorists with their angry outrage culture, and on the other, we have the PC culture of ‘being ‘nice’. The evangelical tribe of ‘do not offend at any cost’ types attempt to purge life of anything that has the slightest vestige of being confrontational, threatening. Yet, Vedanta, the science of nondual Consciousness, does not take any prisoners. It will threaten and challenge everything you thought you knew about who you think you are. To face the inner landscape of our most hidden and wounded selves, we need to have the courage to see ourselves, warts and all. Not to further condemn nor praise, but to negate in light of Self-knowledge.
The truth is that without Self-knowledge, even if we have fairly good lives and are not unfortunate enough to suffer from the despair of loneliness and depression, despite success, fame, fortune, or failure and penury, most of us have erected fortresses of bloody battle disappointment, within and without, by the time we have lived a couple of decades. More if longer. To protect and defend what cannot be protected. The wolf at the door –Maya/Duality or ignorance of my true limitless nature – is already inside, devouring hope in great big gulps.
Psychotherapy can and does help to relieve some internal psychological pressure, there is no doubt about that. But it cannot give meaning to our lives or bring us ongoing happiness, let alone explain why life works the way it does. It is not designed to do so. Psychotherapy is a well-meaning, respectable science that functions with reliable methods of categorization. Even so, it cannot reach a consensus over the question of how to distinguish between ‘normal’ emotional suffering and clinical depression. The fact that no argument like this is possible unless we assume there is such a thing as ‘normal’ emotional suffering or depression, is not addressed.
The inconvenient truth about depression or other mental health issues points to the fact that the cause is never purely chemical. In most cases, it is primarily psychological. I.e., how you relate to what has or is happening to you determines your chemistry, and your chemistry in turn affects your psychology, in a vicious circle. It is impossible to separate the two. It is not that your brain is inherently faulty and can simply be ‘fixed’ with a magic pill. Your brain is a thought-producing machine that will eat you alive if you do not understand the origin or know how to manage your thoughts and emotions.
Most people have little objectivity about their thoughts and feelings and are totally identified with them because nobody teaches them not to. Quite the contrary; the world most live in is designed to enhance our ‘personal ‘ identity. But if you do not understand the forces that govern the mind and create the thoughts and feelings behind its binding fears and desires and have no objectivity about yourself or life, the chances are very good that you will become depressed. Maybe without even knowing it.
You almost certainly will have normalized the abnormal and be totally identified with your life story. Aside from the poor who have ‘real’ survival problems with little time for neurotic concerns, the majority of people in the world are floundering ever more precipitously towards having their inner light extinguished, and falling into the abyss of the futility of life. Life has always been tough, but these days there seems to be a worldwide mental health pandemic. Despondency, anxiety, and fear of the future are rampant.
Depression is not just one thing, it is usually the result of a sliding scale of the tide of long time negative feelings such as fear of the world, sadness, loss, inadequacy, low self-esteem, etc. It is the result of total duality – the absolute belief that there is something wrong with you and the world. That the world is a threatening ‘place’, not just an idea in your head. It is the idea that you need fixing and to be fixed you need something to make you whole that you probably won’t get. Please note, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, Vedanta does not knock the psycho-therapeutic world, it has its place, and it certainly does help in preparing the mind for self-inquiry.
But the problem with most systems of thought, be they philosophical, spiritual, or psychotherapeutic, no matter how brilliant, is that they lack a valid means of knowledge to remove ignorance, the hypnosis of duality, from the mind, to reveal the true nature of life as nondual. They lack knowledge of the impersonal forces that govern and create the larger context of all life – what Vedanta calls the Field of Existence, an intelligent field of natural laws, a product of and run by the creator, which Vedanta calls Isvara, or God. It is another name for the Total Mind, or macrocosmic unconscious.
The field is made up of and run by three energies that condition everything and everyone. They are called in Sanskrit the three gunas, rajas (desire/action/projection), tamas (denial/dullness/fear) and sattva (intelligence/clarity/peace). All thoughts and emotions are generated by these three energies or forces in repetitive, predictable, and understandable, patterns. In Vedanta this priceless teaching is called triguna vibhava yoga, the science of the three energies. They explain exactly how our unconscious motivations work, and where they originate from. But this science is not known to the therapeutic world.
Freud was perhaps the first to unearth the unconscious urges that bedevil humanity and ushered in the age of psychology some 100 years ago. But if psychotherapy, as he supposedly claimed, is a cure through love, what did he mean by love, and what are the solutions to the problem of our lack of love? He, like most others in the field of study of what makes a person mentally and emotionally happy or unhappy, could not provide those answers because he did not know that love is the nature of the soul. He did not understand the nondual nature of life or its true meaning.
Almost all systems of thought and religion base their precepts within the Field of Existence, the world as most know it, and cannot step out of it because they do not have knowledge of the non-dual Self ‘beyond and behind’ all Existence. This world and everything in it is taken to be real, the only reality. The only thing that is truly real, Consciousness, does not come into the equation and is seen inexplicably as something that emerges from the brain.
No available literature offers an unassailable definition of what is real or unreal. Vedanta does, and it is thus: real can only be defined by something that is always present and never changes. The only thing that fits this definition is Consciousness, the Self, the ever-present witness. The one and only factor that can never be negated. Everything else is known to it and is defined as always changing and not always present. No object, whether subtle like a thought or feeling, or gross like your body or your car, is not subject to change nor is always present. So how can it be real?
However, thanks to Freud and others, many people do have some idea by now that all our psychological issues have their source in a deeper unconscious than just the personal unconscious. Vedanta calls this the Causal body. Jung referred to the collective unconscious, for which he had a quasi-mystical definition. But he did not understand the Macrocosmic Unconscious or the forces that run it any more than Freud or any other famous person in the field of psychology did.
Freud and his theories hold less authority today than they once did. Nonetheless, the psychological approach he fathered, that it is our imperative as civilized people to find what it is about ourselves that causes mental and emotional injury to ourselves and others, and then to develop the self-control to prevent or change destructive behaviour patterns going forward, still underpins most therapies. But no protocol the psychotherapeutic world has come up with can ultimately vanquish ‘the beast within’ because it does not know what it is. No matter how many names are thought up to describe what ails us, none of them address the real problem – identification with the body/mind (our story) and ignorance of our true nature as the non-dual Self.
According to some, replacing unconscious repression with conscious renunciation of our primitive, primeval instincts gave rise to civilization and its effects – culture, stability, a sense of purpose, consideration for others, and so on. There is truth to this from the perspective of the small self. But though Freud may have made us more honest about our urges and more cognizant of how they manifested in daily life, he failed to offer any way to understand how they relate to the big picture. Where do we turn for this?
Who to believe has the answers for the state of our world and our misery? Religions tell us the problem is good and evil, that we are sinners and if we curb our evil tendencies and choose good, we will be rewarded, if not in this life, in the next. Philosophers and great thinkers through the ages have offered their ideas about things, some more impactful than others. Most offered ignorance mixed with some knowledge. If we cannot take their word for things, are we, then, to believe our feelings, and take that as our truth?
While Freud did not suggest that we cast off all restraint in favor of our emotional lives, it seems that is what has happened today. Recently, the Freudian imperative to seek fearlessly for the traces of instinctual life has exploded out of control on social media, with the most extreme right wing ideologies spouting the idea of ‘rugged individualism’, and with it, fear of anyone or idea that does not concur with ‘my truth’. While that term seems to have a distinctively American origin, it is a basic and universal human reaction based on fear of being controlled or having what you value taken away. The right to assert and protect my rights over yours at all costs, no matter the cost to the whole. The fear-fueled wave of right-wing populism and the outrage PC culture sweeping the globe yet again is testimony to this.
Contrary to what Vedanta stands firm on—emotion and instinct are your least reliable means of knowledge for the obvious reason that they are always changing—therapeutic faith rests on a conviction that in instinct, and especially in emotions, lies wisdom. While more enlightened therapies today are effective to a degree in teaching emotion management, the idea is that the root of our problems is in determining our true feelings as the all-important determinant of ‘our truth’. The therapist’s unenviable job has always been to help us become masters of our psyches by fine-tuning a spectrum of inner suffering and managing our emotional lives to protect ourselves against assault or why we suffer and cause suffering to others.
Even if you have never set foot in a therapist’s office, you may believe that your suffering is someone else’s fault because you were put on this earth to pursue happiness. If you can’t even dream of that anymore, where do you go now? Does blame help? Sadly, no. It appears that having unleashed the feeling genie from the bottle and given it primacy, how do we now tame those ‘evil spirits’ within ourselves that demand satisfaction and give vent and voice to our deepest darkest fears? For some, implicit in the therapeutic idea is the hopeful proposition that we are not self-limiting creatures, that given freedom and self-knowledge and the opportunity to express our highest values, we will be able to ride the long curve of our history toward ever-increasing growth and progress for all.
While many others do not agree, the optimistic view that we have progressed to a more civilized version of ourselves than history reveals is legitimate. If we look at what is reported in the media on major issues such as health, education, financial stability, poverty, etc., in light of data and statistics instead of negativity and sensationalism, it is true, we have made much progress. The media tend to focus on what is wrong, not right with the world. We are all free to choose the view we wish to have. After all, the world, despite its many problems, is a show that just continues.
At the same time it’s hard for optimism to persevere because it seems the more things change the more they stay the same. The forces at work on us are the same as they have ever been and will remain so in self-perpetuating and repetitive cycles. Light and dark, good and evil are inherent and inescapable factors for the world of duality to play out. That’s the way the world works. But Vedanta, the science of nondual Consciousness, says there is nothing wrong with who we are, or with the world and there is a way out of the hypnosis of duality. But it is only through non-duality, Self-knowledge.
Nobody seeks misery. It is true that the purpose of life is happiness, not misery. Though well intentioned and very sincere, the best Freud could come up with was that though psychoanalysis will not produce happiness, it will give the next most desirable thing: “common unhappiness” rather than “neurotic misery”. In other words, forget about happiness, it’s just pie in the sky. Focus on being grateful that you are ‘functionally dissatisfied’. Why wish for more? If you can get out of bed in the morning, get to work and enjoy some security and comfort, that is enough. Is that enough for you? If you are reading this, most likely not. What’s the alternative?
As stated but bears repeating, Vedanta promotes psychotherapy as an important starting point for many to gain some objectivity about their unconscious drives. If we have a mess of unresolved psychological problems we will not be qualified for self-inquiry. But if you have gained some objectivity about your psychology, and you have suffered enough, you will likely come to the end of how much the therapeutic narrative can help you find perfect satisfaction. It’s quite likely that you have exhausted all spiritual options in your search for the Holy Grail too, and there is nowhere else to go. The capacity to soldier on in the face of the inevitable zero-sum nature of life, let alone to venture into love, becomes harder and harder without a deeper understanding of the big picture, how it relates to our ‘small picture’, and why we suffer so much misery.
Yet also as stated, it is absolutely true that happiness is your birthright and there most definitely is a permanent solution to your lack of it. The principles of Vedanta, the teachings on non-duality, very basically state that there is nothing wrong with you except the way you think. In particular, who you think you are. It has no agenda bar one: that suffering is bad, and happiness is good. It offers a very different view from religious, political, philosophical, or scientific thinking, though it does not oppose any of them, either.
Vedanta contends that it is far from beyond us to understand exactly who we are, what drives us and why, what is the big picture, how it comes to be, and how to relate to it. And, most importantly, how to step out of it. Vedanta not only removes the ignorance of your true nature as the nondual Self. It provides a water-tight teaching on the forces that condition the mind (the gunas), and offers a ‘tool-kit’ (karma yoga) to live a good life. Karma yoga means consecrating all thoughts/feelings and actions in an attitude of gratitude to the Field of life, knowing you are not in charge of the results. If the nondual teachings and these tools are understood and correctly applied to your life, they work to produce that most elusive of all things – permanent satisfaction based on knowledge, not emotion or instinct. Emotions are not denied or suppressed, just understood and not allowed control.
In fact, the teachings on non-duality unfold the whole mandala of life with the irrefutable logic of Existence. You may refute the teachings of course, as everything in this world is up for interpretation according to your conditioning, including ‘logic’. We say logic only stands true if it stands completely alone, free of any and all personal interpretation. Does yours, and does it serve you?
If you have a mind that has had enough suffering, you may have developed the dispassion to set aside what you think you know for a completely different understanding, the Science of Consciousness. If it does not sit well with you and you prefer your ideas better, so be it.
The Lasting Solution
Vedanta’s main premise is that there is no permanent solution to our psychological suffering other than with an independent, valid means of knowledge that allows us to de-personalize our story with reference to the big picture and the forces that run it. The ‘right’ knowledge is the knowledge that removes ignorance of my true nature and ends suffering because I stop looking for happiness where it cannot be found: outside my Self, capital ‘S’. Self-knowledge is always true in all circumstances, and states of mind. It stands independent of my experience, beliefs, and time. It is knowledge that cannot be disputed or negated by any other knowledge, be it scientific, philosophical, or religious. It is also called the Knowledge that ends the quest for Knowledge.
Self-knowledge 101
It is my experience, and the contention of Vedanta, that peace of mind or happiness is not to be found in indulging our likes and dislikes—meaning, by gaining or avoiding anything. ‘My’ thoughts and feelings are not the problem, only my identification with them. The fundamental cause of all mental and emotional suffering originates solely from ignorance of our true nature and, thus, a mind that is controlled by erroneous, involuntary thoughts and emotions and the forces that generate them. The solution is self-inquiry.
What is Self-Inquiry?
Self-inquiry involves an analysis of what makes up and governs the Field of Existence, which includes the individual, with the aim of negating our dependence on objects for happiness. It is to discriminate between non-duality and duality, i.e., between experience (the object/effect) and Consciousness, the subject/cause. There is a world of a difference between these two perspectives because it reveals that an object is anything other than me, the knower of objects, i.e. Consciousness, the Self. The objects I know include my little-self, whom I have thus far taken to be ‘me’. But it is not the ‘real’ me.
Self-inquiry conducted correctly produces non-dual vision. Non-dual vision is permanent freedom from limitation because it is not only about understanding our conditioning; it is freeing ourselves of it. The steps to ‘get there’ are the qualities of ‘being there’. ‘There’ being permanent peace of mind. Perfect dispassion, perfect satisfaction.
Sundari