Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism
presumption. Despite this caveat, it is clear that Buddhist ethics and compassion
cannot ultimately rest in specific rules or formal practices, any more than ultimate
reality can be captured by finite concepts and discriminations. Buddhist ethics
ultimately demands a fully integrated awareness of the emptiness of all phenomena,
including precepts, of any absolute existence or independent truth.
And what has emptiness to do with ethics and social value? Buddhism
locates hard-heartedness and malice ultimately in a false sense of reality. We
imagine that things – including ourselves – exist in a way that they do not. We
either absolutistically confer upon our experience a (inherent or ultimate) reality
it does not have, or nihilistically reject the (conventional) reality it does have.
These polar opposites of absolutism and relativism are united by a common absolutist
assumption, revealed in the disposition to cling to things as though they
were really real, to reify the contents of experience, even in our nihilistic repudiations
of it. Thus we cling to false images as part of a defensive posture that exaggerates
the nature of the boundaries between things, and between those things and
the self. Those enforced boundaries between self and world dull our sensitivity to
both. They ground a false sense of entitlement to withdraw care selectively from
those we judge unworthy. Thus we harden our hearts to others and to ourselves.
The ultimate antidote for this blindness is a correct understanding of emptiness,
which allows us to begin to see things as they are, erasing the enforced
boundaries between self and other, ending the objectification of experience down
to the subtlest forms of dualistic conceptualization, including ethical dualism, and
opening us completely to self and other. It is here that wisdom and compassion
are perfected and united in complete enlightenment – in unbounded, unconditional,
spontaneous, and ongoing love.
Gestalt Psychology and Buddhism
Let us now compare Gestalt psychology and Mahayana Buddhism –
specifically its Madhyamika school – first with regard to epistemology. Despite
vast differences in cultural and historical context, the broad strokes of their message
seem frequently to coincide. Each asserts the lack of independent reality
of all phenomena, their dependence upon things beside themselves. In rejecting
absolute existence, Gestalt theory asserts relational determination, while
Buddhism offers dependent-arising or interdependent origination. They not only
agree that existence and meaning are relational, but describe this relationality
often in quite similar terms.
Both viewpoints thus reject naive realism, the spontaneous and unreflective
attribution of independent existence to things across our perceptual world. Naive
realism is the illusion of inherent existence run rampant. For what perception naively
takes to be independent physical reality is instead phenomenal representation,
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