Having
engaged in dialogue with both Buddhist and Western psychological views of the
self I would like to return to the opening task set out in this chapter –
namely, how can this dialogue help us
when encountering the pastoral situation of healing anger in a Christian
context? Once again we can return to Fr Thomas’s writings on the subject where
he presents us with the Christian approach to the problem (CL: 117 – 118). This
can be summarised thus:
1. We must
first ‘delve deep into the unconscious and uncover the hidden and forgotten
experiences and be reconciled with them’. Whether we are Buddhist, Christian or
Western Atheist, we all have the same minds as human beings. What the dialogue
of this chapter shows is that, to use the phrase of the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), we all form our ‘pictures of the facts’ (Wir machen uns Bilder der Tatsachen, Wittgenstein
1993 1:14). Whether we call that picture ‘unconscious’ or ‘skandha’, in our
reflection on our most shameful and negative acts we return to these ‘hidden
and forgotten experiences’ as we seek to be reconciled with them. How is that
done? Fr Thomas continues:
2. By
‘positive thinking, forgiveness, repentance, rationalization and
self-acceptance’. A whole book could be written on this path and constraints of
space do not permit me to explore them further here. Perhaps Fr Thomas may yet
write another book that does that! For now, I refer the interested reader to my
book Confession: The Healing of the Soul
(Tyler 2017) which in like fashion explored many of these themes as manifest in
the Christian sacrament of Reconciliation.
If we follow this path, says Fr Thomas, ‘that is indeed liberation and
enlightenment’. Yet, running like a golden thread through his teachings, FrThomas
reminds us that for Christians this healing forgiveness has one mediation – in
the person of Jesus Christ, the living Lord and Guru. For whereas ‘Adam’ in the
Christian tradition holds all the sufferings and duḥkha described by the Buddhists, Christ, the ‘new man’,
the ‘new Adam’ holds the liberation , the suḥkha, of all beings. And this perhaps marks the
strongest divergence between the Buddhist path presented above and the
Christian path followed by a Christian contemplative such as Fr Thomas. For as
Fr Thomas explained in his earlier Comparative
Theology:
The Buddhist way is for the most part a psychotherapy. This is quite
understandable, indeed, for according to the Buddhist diagnosis the basic
illness of man is mental, namely that his mind is badly determined and
controlled by the unhealthy factors
generating in him restlessness, tension, anxiety etc., as a result of which he
is unable himself as a mature man. (Kochumuttom 1985:136)[1]
Writing on
this same point shortly before his death, the 20th Century American
Cistercian, Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) in the Preface to his book The New Man in 1967, mused on how we can
‘convert’ emotions and states of mind from the destructive to the constructive.
First, he suggests, there is psychoanalysis: ‘if you have a great deal
of money and can afford a long analysis – and can find an especially good
psychoanalyst’. Yet, even with this, psychoanalysis can, at the best he
suggests, only lead to ‘workable compromises which enable us to function... we
are not born again, we simply learnt to put up with ourselves’ (Merton 1989: 145).
Freud himself held up no great hope for ultimate liberation or enlightenment
arising from therapy, rather he often expressed the aim as one of reaching
‘normal neurosis’ or ‘common unhappiness’ (see Tyler 2014: 98).
A second means to transformation, according to Merton, is through mass
movements ‘sometimes of extremist character, sometimes messianic and political
quasi-religious’ (Merton 1989: 145). Yet this is an ideology or a political
‘cause’ rather than a metaphysical transformation. Merton wrote perceptively of
the movements he had witnessed in the 20th Century – Nazism and
Communism. Yet, as we now move into the post-pandemic phase are we not seeing
the rise of new political and ideological movements, often based on nationalist
or narrow racial bases? Can these liberate? Will these provide the answers our
times desperately seek? Our analysis here suggests not. Rather, as Fr Thomas
suggested earlier, we are to seek that spiritual transformation of the whole
person. Like him, Merton acknowledges a psychological ‘unconscious’ dimension
to this work:
It is a deep spiritual consciousness which takes man beyond the level of
his individual ego. This deep consciousness, to which we are initiated by
spiritual rebirth, is an awareness that we are not merely our everyday selves
but we are also One who is beyond all human and individual self-limitation.
(Merton 1989: 146)
And as with
Fr Thomas, so Merton sees this ‘rebirth’ for Christians as the adoption of the persona Christi: ‘to be born again is to
be born beyond egoism, beyond selfishness, beyond individuality in Christ’ (1989:
146/7). This ‘rebirth in Christ’ is as much a ‘rebirth of the passions in Christ’.
With regards to anger this must be immersed constantly into the Jordan of the
unconscious so that Christ may absorb and transform it. This is not a one-off
process but something that recurs throughout life:
Birth in the Spirit happens many times in a man’s life, as he passes
through successive stages of spiritual development... True Christianity is
growth in the life of the Spirit, a deepening of the new life, a continuous
rebirth, in which the exterior and superficial life of the ego-self is discarded
like an old snake skin and the mysterious invisible self of the Spirit becomes
more present and more active. (Merton 1989: 147)
So then, to
conclude our dialogue and this chapter, Fr Thomas suggests in his essay that
when we deal with particular pastoral situations, such as the dealing with
anger, we do so on two levels. On one level there is our individual story
reflected in the conscious levels of the ‘ego’. But on the other there is a
metaphysical, or what he calls a ‘collective consciousness’. Our individuality
is thus a sharing in the mystical body of Christ:
As each individual should become enlightened with regard to his personal
unconscious, so, in and through the same process of personal enlightenment, the
whole humanity becomes and should become enlightened with regard to the
collective unconscious, eventually resulting in the emergence of the new
creation – the new earth and the new heaven (Rev 21:1) with God becoming all in
all (I Cor 15:29). (CL: 119)
[1]
Gay Watson develops this theme in her ‘Resonance of Emptiness’ from which I
have drawn liberally in this chapter. She concludes by suggesting the ‘next
turning of the wheel of Dharma’ in the West will inevitably be connected with
its involvement with the evolving practices of psychology and psychotherapy.
This ‘prediction’ made in 1998 has partly been realised with the mass
‘mindfulness’ movement that has become so prevalent in the West in the past
decade. When I researched my ‘Christian Mindfulness’ in 2017-8 I had an
interesting conversation with the noted Buddhist scholar, Rupert Gethin, who
also suggested that what might be happening in the West today is the
development of mindfulness as a new
phenomenon in the West that ‘eschews traditional Buddhist practices (such as
devotional rituals) and the traditional framework of karma and rebirth... and
replaces these with a more therapeutic framework’ (Tyler 2018: 15). Thus, Fr
Thomas’s identification of the samskara
skandha with the Western unconscious, as explored in this chapter, looks set to remain important as Buddhism evolves
and develops in the West in tandem with psychology and psychotherapeutic
practices.
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