Buddhist Romanticism

“out there” as a primary reality and trying to fit oneself, as a secondary
reality, into the context of those laws, they proposed starting with
consciousness as it is experienced from within as primary reality, and
regarding the cosmos out there as secondary. Only then, they stated, could
the problems and illnesses of consciousness be healed.
The difference in the Buddha’s case is that he went considerably further
than either James or Jung in discovering what true health for the psyche
could be: a dimension totally free from the constraints of space and time.
From that discovery, he was able to evaluate theories of causality and the
universe, and to reject any that would not allow for the experience he had
attained.
This, as we have noted, is called the phenomenological approach. And
the Buddha aimed his attention directly at the most pressing
phenomenological problem: the problem of suffering and how to end it. My
suffering is something that only I can feel. Yours is something that only you
can feel. I cause my suffering through my own unskillfulness, and can put
an end to it by developing skillfulness in all my actions. The same principle
applies to you. In other words, the problem is felt from within, caused from
within, and can be cured only from within. And as long as we claim our
identity as part of an unstable web of connections, we will never be able to
effect a cure.
This means that if we insist on choosing to hold to a worldview in which
there is no escape from a web of interconnections, we leave ourselves
subject to continued suffering without end.
As for the Buddhist Romantic arguments that an immanent view of
awakening is superior to a transcendent view, these boil down to two
assertions. The first is that an immanent goal is nondualistic, whereas a
transcendent goal is dualistic. This argument carries force only if “dual” is
inherently inferior to “nondual.” But the problem of suffering is inherently
dual, both in the distinction between suffering and its end, and in the
teaching that there are causes and effects. Either you suffer or you don’t.
You create the causes that lead to suffering, or you follow a path of action
that leads to suffering’s end. If you decide that suffering is not a problem,
you are free to continue creating the causes of suffering as you like. But if
you want to stop suffering, then you are committed to taking on these two
dualities and seeing that here, at least, dualism opens up opportunities that
nondualism closes off.
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