psychology and enlightenment

Western psychology reinforces the sense of self

To become enlightened though

That sense of self must disappear

Psychology – that is the study of the human mind, the personality and behaviour – is a fascinating subject. And its related discipline of psychotherapy aims to use those psychological insights to help people lead more healthy, balanced, fulfilled lives. And to do this it tries to build a stable and healthy sense of self. It encourages the individual to find his or her place in society, to know the cultural roots that one comes from, to have a sense of purpose and belonging.

All of this is perfectly okay if one wants to lead a purely secular life, if one wants to fit in with the social norms of society. But on the spiritual journey we are engaged in a completely different endeavour. And that is to realise, to make real, who we are at a fundamental level. And this is spiritual enlightenment: to realise one's true nature. And this doesn't come about through building a robust sense of a separate self, of having a strong personality. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Our individual story gets in the way of us seeing who we really are, underneath all that.

There's nothing particularly wrong with personality, and even having a sense of oneself as being separate, as long as we understand that that is an arbitrary story needed for society to function, and needed for the individual to function within society. If you lived alone on a desert island, you wouldn't need any of that. You wouldn't need a name. You wouldn't need a personality as such. It would have no purpose. You wouldn't need a sense of self in the way that we do in the social context. And that's why it's not fundamental to who we are. It's a construct, perhaps useful, perhaps problematic, but either way, it's just a construct. It's not fundamental.

So to find out who we really are, to get in touch once more with our essence, or what I refer to as our buddha nature, for that to happen, we have to set aside this sense of a separate self. We have to let it drop away. And this is really exactly the opposite of what is happening in psychotherapy.

Now I'm not saying psychotherapy is bad. If one has become very messed up psychologically, then of course it's great to heal those wounds, especially if one has been traumatised. It's really essential to heal. But assuming one has done that work and is in a fairly wholesome place within oneself, then the spiritual journey is about allowing that sense of self to melt away. And only when one is sensing life in a selfless way has one come home to who one really is. And when I say selfless, I don't mean it in the usual sense of just going around helping other people. I mean it more literally: living life without a sense of self.

We have to be a little bit careful with the words here. When I say self, I mean the small self, an individual human being, separate from the rest of existence. This is the self that melts away on this journey. Some spiritual teachings use the word Self, with a capital S, to mean the fundamental part of oneself. I don't tend to use that word to mean this buddha nature, just to try and avoid misunderstanding, because our buddha nature is not individual. It's not personal at all. It's universal. It comes from existence. It is existence. And it is divine.