Enlightenment Therapy

THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE has an insightful article by Chip Brown, called "Enlightenment Therapy". A Zen master feels that his life is a shambles, and seeks understanding at the other end of the philosophical rainbow. Worth a pondering read.

Zen and psychoanalysis have been courting for decades, as dizzy with their differences as a couple in a screwball comedy. The two disciplines — one, a much-revised theory of mind and therapy for neurotic illness from fin de siècle Vienna; the other a largely unchanged spiritual technique for realizing enlightenment from fifth-century China — broadly share the goal of relieving mental suffering. But their metaphysical premises and practical methods are night and day.

For decades the feeling of being “one” with the universe, prized in Zen as an attribute of enlightenment, was belittled by many psychoanalysts as an “infantile regression.” By the same token, the injunction “know thyself,” the ultimate chocolate-cherry in the candy box of Western wisdom, was brushed off by Zen adherents as a delusion. 

“The vessel you took to escape your childhood became your prison cell. If we could move through that, I think it would open things even more.”