[Buddha-l] Modern Advaita sages

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2006-01-10 at 23:27 -0500, curt wrote:

> I think that most "modern" psychologists, you know the type - they say
> things like "the mind is what the brain does" and crap like that -
> they just blindly accept a 
> cookie cutter ideology of science, without ever really looking at it. 

As you no doubt know, that is a pretty shallow characterization of the
work of the likes of Stephen Pinker and V.S. Ramachandran. And it would
be an even more shallow characterization of the work of the late Wilder
Penfield (whose work I came to know intimately as a result of walking
down Docteur Penfield Drive to work at McGill University every day for
fifteen years). Theirs is not the sort of work Jung did, to be sure, but
these folks need not be dismissed as dispensing crap or blindly
accepting much of anything.

> Jung "root wrestled" with questions like what kind of evidence is
> possible and what kind of evidence is really important. Of course he
> was also a hopeless romantic. Imagine - talking to people about their
> dreams!

No doubt among the most interesting (and, dare I say it, transformative)
things I have done is to spend four years talking to a Jungian
psychoanalyst about my dreams. (We also talked a lot about his dog, who
had such a crush on me that he kept appearing in my dreams.) 

Jungian analysis is an interestingly intense form of spiritual inquiry
designed for people who have a fantasy that they have way too much
money. The analyst helps them cure the fantasy by charging $80 for 50
minutes of listening to them talk about their dreams and then making
them explain the meaning of their dreams. The analyst says nothing,
except "I see we're out of time. You keep working on that dream, until
its interminable meanings become apparent to you." After four or five
years of this, the analysand says "I can't continue, because I'm not
only broke but in debt up to my eyeballs." Then the analyst says "Good!
You no longer have that fantasy about having way too much money." It
worked for me.

-- 
Richard