Buddhism and Psychotherapy:
Interview With Dr. Miles Neale
 |
| Psycho-babel is still psycho-babel, even when a touch of Buddhism is added |
"Increasingly,
aspects of Buddhism
are being incorporated into psychotherapy
and mainstream healing approaches.
How do you explain this integration?
Buddhist, and other non-dual ancient Indian worldviews, negate the mind-body split and thereby posses holistic, rigorous, and comprehensive psychologies. With as much scientific precision as modern physics, Buddhism has explored the nature of consciousness and reality for millennia. And yet unlike our Western scientific traditions, Buddhism not only posits that human gnosis and happiness are actually possible, it grounds the endeavor of consciously cultivating one's mind within a context of interdependence and universal ethics, motivated by an altruistic intention to assist all sentient life in their evolutionary development towards awakening. Given the ever-growing challenges of civilized living we now face on the planet, I believe we are not only turning to Buddhism for its powerful methods of meditation for personal self-healing, but also for a more coherent, comprehensive and compassionate paradigm of reality and the potential of the human mind so that we may actually direct positive evolution on social and global levels.
In psychotherapy, clinicians are familiar with treating people who suffer from psychiatric disorders or disturbances in psychological functioning. How are such conditions conceptualized from a Buddhist perspective?
From a Buddhist perspective the variety of mental disorders have a single root cause. We are all delusional to some degree because each of us possesses a distorted view of reality that contributes to our experience of suffering. Our distorted perception forces us to misapprehend things as separate, including ourselves, thus pitting us against a world of discrete entities and compelling us to gratify and defend that which we arbitrarily deem as “I,” “me,” or “mine.” If we examine the current state of affairs on this planet, we quickly see the deleterious result of holding such an erroneous view. From domestic and school violence, to drug, sex, and slave trafficking, on up to corporate greed, religious wars, and the wide-spread ecological destruction. Unlike most psychotherapies, Buddhism addresses this root cause, the fundamental delusion of separateness.
We are very fortunate that luminaries and experts in the fields of Tibetan Buddhism, neuroscience and psychotherapy have signed on as faculty including Joe Loizzo, Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg, Daniel Siegel, Richie Davidson, and Rick Hanson. This is a truly unique program and an historic moment in Nalanda’s growth."
PsychologyToday
For men shall be lovers of their own selves,
2 Timothy 3:2
So in the "scientific" world of psychology, you can bring in Buddhism but not the Christian God?.....