Similar ideas between Buddhism and Western psychology
Photo credit: Paula Bronstein / Getty Images
- Modern psychologists attribute less power to the conscious self.
- Buddhism has significant insight on how to counter listless states of desire.
- Doubting the ego just might be good for the ego itself.
Many Western philosophers and scientists have for some time neglected Buddhist thought. As they saw it as either pure mysticism or couldn’t wrap their heads around the seemingly contradictory nature of its teachings. Due to this incomprehension, much has been lost from ignoring this rich body of thought. On first glance, the teachings will sound quite counterintuitive to our usual logical mode of inquiry.
Take for example this quote from Nagarjuna, a second-century Buddhist philosopher who once said:
The nature of things is to have no nature; it is their non-nature that is their nature. For they have only one nature: no-nature.
Alan Watts, the philosopher-sage, knew very much about this marriage of opposites and their contradictory but often illuminating perspective on the nature of reality. In one of his many books, Psychotherapy East and West, Watts remarked about the similarity between the madman and the enlightened guru type.
One’s life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.
While this division of the cultural thinking has produced drastically different ways of treating mental illness and approaching psychological matters; it would seem that on closer inspection that Buddhism and modern psychology and even science for that matter have a lot more in common than people realize.
