Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 97
previously unbearable contents, one’s conception of the situation changes.
Absolutized meanings give way to a deeper awareness of interdependent relations.
This expanded perspective recognizes its higher level of truth, which has
outgrown the need for previous levels of reification. In the process, some of the
burden of standing guard over the illusion of an independent self is lifted. There
is less and less of that shaky construction to protect from inner and outer threats.
Thus the pain, perhaps grief, associated with early insight into the illusion of
independent self may begin to give way to a new sense of peace and freedom, and
a new openness to self and world.
One thus returns to the place one never really left, to our world and the
sentient beings that inhabit it. In the shedding of progressive layers of reification,
with their sequelae of hard-heartedness and deluded desire, compassion and
lovingkindness are further released. The bodhichitta motivation to achieve
enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings crystallizes as a natural awareness
of universal responsibility to others, not as a duty or chore, but as a pure and
spontaneous response to the needs of beings we grow to love without exception
or condition.
As we have seen, cultural context plays a critical role in this development.
Societies may nurture or oppose the growth of individual minds, and perhaps all
do at least a little of both. There seems to be a conservative tendency in all societies,
and thus in each enculturated mind, to enforce their own cultural meanings
as absolute. This requires the maintenance of a certain level of unconsciousness,
with its own specific potential for stupidity and malice. Societies may also succumb
to the nihilistic error, where members willfully deceive and exploit their
fellows, often for money or power, and often behind a facade of social concern.
These tendencies extend past criminality to the manipulation of public consciousness
by the sanctioned agents of politics and/or commerce, to effect change
by narrowing the mental field and discouraging open inquiry. It would be a worthy
task for phenomenology to expose the cognitive and emotional meanings that
support such cynical intentions, to which our culture largely acquiesces.
However, these harmful effects of cultures are balanced by other beneficial
social forces. For the group identification that empowers a culture cannot last
unless its members deem it well-meaning and credible on a more general scale.
Cultural membership helps people sustain in their personal lives the qualities that
they appreciate in their fellows. Individual effort and courage are often inspired
by a sense of the greater good. Where pride in one’s group is called into question,
societies (and individuals?) tend to polarize to establish it in an opposing part.
A measure of the quality of a culture is its ability to bear differences (cf. loyal
opposition) within an overarching sense of shared identity, reflecting an equivalent
capacity for relational as opposed to absolutized thinking among its
members. This societal integration – whose good faith can face internal conflict
without absolutism’s nihilistic presumptions of irreconcilability – provides