BUDDHA’S CONTRIBUTION TO MENTAL HEALTH

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

      People know the religious aspect of Buddha. They know that 2500 years ago he was born into a wealthy Indian family and at some point left his opulent living and sought to understand whether life on earth has meaning or not. He is said to have studied the various Hindu paths to God and could not find what he was looking for and finally sat down under a Bo tree and refused to get up until the answer he sought was revealed to him.  While there, he was tempted by Mara (equivalent to Christian concept of Satan) and told that if he gave up seeking the truth that he would be given the whole world, given as much power, wealth and sex as he wanted etc.  But Buddha was steadfast in his search for the truth and did not allow himself to be persuaded that flimflam is worthy of living for. Finally, he experienced what Buddhists call Nirvana and got up from his meditation and began teaching.

         Buddha taught that to live on earth is to desire to live as a separated self.  The desire for separated self leads to suffering. To end that suffering one must give up the desire for separated self and return to our natural state, unified self (undifferentiated life).  Additionally, one must live a moral life, helping other people and being honest in ones dealings with all people. 

      Buddha founded a religious order dedicated to teaching the above truth and encouraged people to renounce the ego-self and its world and enter a monastic living where they lived the simple live, begging for their food, mediating and trying to attain nirvana. 

        This is the religious aspect of Buddha. What is not always known is the tremendous contribution his approach to life made to psychology.

       In my view, Gautama Buddha was probably the best psychologist that human beings have produced. His approach to people yields the best results for them: gives them mental health, peace and happiness. 

       Essentially, Buddha taught people that they have false self concepts and strive to make those false selves important and in the process give themselves unnecessary pain and suffering. People sentence themselves to hell by trying to seem to have a separated important self. They do not have separated important selves and Buddha asks them to give up their separated selves and their pursuit of importance.

      Buddha teaches that we all have a desire for a self that created itself, created other people and created everything in the world; a self that wants to change whatever it sees and transforms it to its liking, change people to how it wants them to become, hence gratify its desire for power. 

        The ego self often sees itself as too big to perform the ordinary works needed to survive on this planet and wants to have other people, those it sees as inferior to it, to do them for it.  The ego wants to be powerful and wealthy (without working for it, perhaps, win billions of dollars in a lottery and build the best mansion there is in the world). The ego dreams of becoming the president of the world and make the world over to whatever it wants it to be like.  In short, the ego is playing God and wants to create the world and lord it over the world.

        When such grandiose selves go into religion they want to use religion to make themselves the biggest self in the religious world; they want to become the saviors of the world. These people are empowering their ego false selves and are not religious, for to be religious is to relinquish the ego self, Buddha teaches.

        Deluded religionists, aka paranoid prophets, want to use religion to get people to sing praises to their egos, egos that do not even exist in the real world; the ego is just an imaginary self.

     None of the wishes of the special separated self is ever going to happen in the real world, for they are fantasies, mental constructs, ideas in the individual’s thinking, mind, not realities in the world of space, time and matter.

         Only those wishes that could be realized in the empirical world can be accomplished. Even then they exist temporarily, for the world is an impermanent changeable place. The real world is limited by matter, space and time and nothing in it can be perfect.

     The separated special self is different in different persons; the degree and strength of the wish for specialness, importance, power and wealth is different in different persons. For example, some people consider an ordinary house good enough house, whereas some want a grandiose mansion (Adolf Hitler wanted grand castles; to his ego, ordinary houses were not good enough).  The point is that some persons have more rigidly grand egos, whereas the many have flexible egos.

        However, regardless of the strength of the ego, the solution to the ego, small or big, is the same: give the ego up; give up wishing for what does not exist; what does not exist cannot be important or unimportant.  The ego does not exist; whatever it does is done in a dream like setting and does not matter. Take the ego as an instrument with which to play with in the dream of separation but do not take it and its dream, the world and its activities seriously. Relax and enjoy the dream drama.

     Buddha wants to help people to get rid of their imaginary big selves, for he knows that they do not exist; he knows that our ego selves are make belief.  If you get rid of your ego self concept, you feel peaceful and happy. You are freed from slavery to egoism.

        People who do not understand the teachings of Buddha place him on a pedestal and worship him (as they also misunderstood Jesus Christ and worship him as god).  He does not want you to worship him, to praise him, for the him you are praising he knows does not exist, and belief in it gives one pain and suffering. 

       It is the pursuit of others acknowledgement of ones ego self that gives folks pain and suffering, and they ought to let it go, so as to experience peace and joy. 

        Those attached to the ego easily feel slighted and avoid doing things that would seem to humiliate their non existent ego selves.  They feel angry when their ego is degraded. One must have an ego (and its pride and vanity) to feel angry. But if one knows that the ego dies not exist, it follows that it cannot be degraded and cannot be made angry.  (By the same token, one must have an ego to feel fearful and anxious and take measures to defend ones self.)

MEDITATION

       Buddhism teaches what Hinduism calls Raja Yoga, the royal yoga, aka meditation.  Buddhism urges people to recognize that their thinking is ego-based and, as such, not the truth. The ego is the separated self and does not have access to all selves; its information is always limited and whatever it concludes is not the whole truth. Ego-based thinking cannot tell the individual who he is, who other people are, what things are and mean.  The ego can only give opinions of things but not the truth of things.  Therefore, one ought to negate ego-based thinking and remain quiet. In meditation the individual sees all his thinking as noise making, as ego chatter and does not accept them as the truth. All conceptual understanding is not the truth.

        If the individual stays silent for, say, one hour, he feels inner peace and joy (for peace and happiness are synonymous; where one is the other is, also).  When the mind is swept clean of all ego based thinking, a mind where the ego self concept is jettisoned, albeit temporarily, the individual attains no-separated self feeling, and is now open to the revelation of a different self.  Such a mind may escape from the world of separation and multiplicity (the empirical world we see ourselves in)  and enter the unified world where all are one self and one mind; where there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object; a world of no perception; a world of knowledge; a world where all are joined as one self; a world of spirit;  a world where one self ends and another begins is no where; a world where all are in all. 

        Buddhism calls this experience Nirvana (Hindus call it Samadhi, Zen calls it Satori and Christians call it Mystical Union). 

        Buddha teaches that the undifferentiated world attained in meditative states is the real world and our real home; that what we see as our current world is a mere dream and that what we call our present selves, ego selves housed in bodies, are figments in a dream.  As he sees it, we must let go of our ego selves, and as it were, permit the ego to die so that we experience the world of unified self, which is a world of absolute bliss, a world of changelessness and permanence, in short, the opposite of our empirical world.

    Whereas ultimately we must let go of the separated ego self, but as long as we are on earth, in the dream of separation, we must have some ego. The dream requires us to have ego separated selves.

       However, those false selves could be put to a better purpose, serving all other egos. A dreamer who serves the interests of other dreamers is a happy dreamer. Each of us has special ego skills. Use your special ego talents to serve all egos.

      Actually, each of us is here to do particular things. Do what you are here to do. If one does not do what one is here to do, nothing will work well for one; all doors would close to one.  The universe is one and works through every person and will make them not open doors for one and nothing will work out in ones life unless one does what one is here to do.

         What each of us is here to do must be done and is a very important function for the liberation of the all of us from our jail house, the ego.

       Each of us is assigned an ego task to perform by the Holy Spirit (and by himself since the Holy Spirit is his higher self).  The Holy Spirit has the task of emancipating us from the hell we got ourselves into, the ego and the egos world.

        Each of us must do his part for the children of God to find peace and happiness  (never mind if they blow themselves up with nuclear weapons; they do not die, what matters is whether they are peaceful and happy while they are dreaming that thy are here on earth).

    For the individual to be helpful to other persons he must first liberate himself from his own enslavement to the ego.  He must free himself from identification with ego separated, special self.  You must first save you before you can teach salvation to other persons. You must first experience the peace and joy of having no attachment to the ego before you can teach other people to let go of their ego and live from their Christ, unified self.

        What each individual is here to do is not what other people are supposed to do.  You do what you are supposed to do and do not bother yourself whether other people find it interesting or not. Only those who are supposed to find it interesting would pay attention to it. Not every person is seeking salvation at this time; some are still enjoying the dream of separation and specialness and find their egos desirable and defend them; leave them to be where they are.  You cannot force folks to be where they are not yet ready to be. Do your part and those who are ready for it would listen to you and come to you.

     When the teacher is ready, his student will come to him; when the student is ready, his teacher would come to him. Teacher and student is the same person, albeit in two seeming people; they teach and learn from each other.

CONCLUSION

      Buddha taught a psychology that leads to finding inner peace and happiness. Peace and happiness are the state of mind of a healthy person. This mental health is attained through jettisoning the false separated, special self and identifying with the unified spirit self.

       Buddha’s approach to psychology gave mankind what it needs most: peace, joy and liberation from identification from false separated ego self and return to the real self, unified self.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

November 16, 2006.

ozodiosuji@yahoo.ca

Robot  Villager

# 1 BUDDHA’S CONTRIBUTION TO MENTAL HEALTH ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 16.11.2006 19:11