Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Suffering from Biobabble 137
fluid and emergent in our own thoughts and actions; it is neither wholly predetermined,
as an adaptation to an environment, nor completely unpredictable and
random.
The Buddhist theory of karma is consonant with psychodynamic theories
and therapies about our tendencies to repeat the conflicts and emotional habits
that are outside our awareness. To free ourselves from destructive emotional
habits or change our irrational fears or reduce our discontent, we must come to
know our own motives, especially those that we repeatedly project into others.
I borrow some words from contemporary psychoanalyst Schafer (1978) who
describes the course of psychoanalysis in the following way:
The analys and progressively recognizes, accepts, revises, refines, and lives in terms
of the idea of the self as agent. This is to say that, in one way or another and more
and more, the analysand sees himself or herself as being the person who essentially
has been doing the things from which he or she was apparently suffering upon entering
analysis ... (p. 180)
Buddhist and psychoanalytic practices have developed theories and methods
for understanding suffering. This way of thinking leads to a set of moral principles
or values that holds people accountable for their actions. It should be
sufficiently clear that this ethic stands as a stark contrast to the ideology of biological
determinism and the bad gene.
When the metaphysics of Western Judeo-Christian religions was overtaken
by the metaphysics of Western sciences, the ethics of Western religions were lost
in the process. The ethic of suffering that I expressed above could just as easily
have been formulated from an account of the Ten Commandments or the Golden
Rule. Western religions advocate close attentions to one’s thoughts and actions in
the practice of becoming an ethical human being. But the defeat of the metaphysics
of religion by those of science in the West has also meant a loss of the
ethical teachings of the religions in any form that might reach large numbers of
people in order to have a major influence.
Americans seem baffled by the senseless acts of violence – homicides and
suicides among them – carried out even by privileged young people living in our
society and benefiting from all of our advancements of the natural sciences. We
have seemed unable to grasp the consequences of our loss of an ethic of suffering.
When human traits, from the sublime to the undesirable, are explained in
terms of adaptations and genes, how can anyone who has developed during these
times take seriously a belief in personal responsibility for oneself, let alone for
one’s community and society?
Within a human science of subjectivity, ethics and morality become part of
the contemporary metaphysics of science; the study of personhood would certainly
be on a metaphysical par with the study of organic processes. Surely we
deceive ourselves if we believe that the humanities and religions can carry the