Enlightenment Therapy

By CHIP BROWN

Published: April 23, 2009

I. The Invisible Man If he hadn’t been so distraught, he might have laughed at the absurdity of it: a Zen master in the waiting room of a psychoanalyst. He was a connoisseur of contradictions, an unsentimental man with a “Zen noir” temperament and an un-self-sparing wit. “Anywhere I hang myself is home,” he liked to say. It amused him that the greatest discovery of his life happened almost by accident — that his decision to renounce a tenured professorship in philosophy and become a Zen Buddhist monk 35 years ago rested not just on the traditional revelations of an enlightenment experience (floods of light, samadhi or oneness, ineffable joy) but also on some farcical hurdles concerning Jewish wedding etiquette and his belated discovery that he had indeed been circumcised as a kid.

But that afternoon in July 2006, driving from his home in Brewster, N.Y., to the shrink’s office in Bedford Hills, he was frantic with anxiety. He found a seat facing the door, consumed with the feeling that no one could see him, that he’d become, in his phrase, “the invisible man.” He feared what the desire to be seen might drive him to do. How could he have spent his life cultivating unity of body and mind, oneness with all beings and the ability to apprehend reality directly, unmediated by thoughts or concepts or what Zen considered the arch delusion of “the self” — only to be haunted by the feeling that he lacked the most basic unity of all?

Long article continued at New York Times.

I.m.o. psychoanalysis/psychotherapy should idealiter end with enlightenment. At least a transformationproces at a deep level in the direction of freedom, deconditioning, enlightenment should be started. All other endings, "healings" can only be half, superficial, aimed at the symptoms and at adaptation to a certain society, to a conditioned life. It means not overcoming the dualism of normal/abnormal, sick/healthy witch are the two sides of the same coin.

I.m.o. in schizophrenia the contradictions, dualism of a society manifests itself in some persons so that they can function as scapegoats for the rest. Because some are labelled as crazy, the rest is not. They can only exist together (a conditioned state of affairs). Both are not free, depend on each other. They both live –to say it in Buddhist terms- in their own prisons separated from each other by illusions, which can take the form of all kinds of rationalisations, including "scientific" ones.

How does a person qualify themselves as a Zen Master?

Or did he qualify himself? Maybe thats why he needs a shrink?