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Zen in the West

ThatsWhatHeSaid

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I found this awesome book yesterday hidden in my house-library Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis by Suzuki, Fromm, and De Martino. So far, the book is pretty awesome. The topic has fascinated me for a while and I think the parallels are pretty outstanding.

There's been some speculation that Zen will catch on in the West by assimilating with psychotherapy. There're already some intimations that this process has begun. Mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR), and the use of mindfulness as a way to address depression, anxiety, and other issues is one example, but I'm sure there are many more. The book talks about how in traditional psychoanalysis, the goal is to relieve the person of their neuroses/psychoses that frustrate their attempts to achieve "healthy social functioning," yet in Zen, the goal is to go beyond social integration and [do whatever it is Enlightenment does--connect man to himself, his nature]. I personally see this all existing along the same continuum that stretches from anxious to peaceful (or resistance to acceptance, or what have you). Thoughts?

What do you think Zen will look like in the West? Will it be formalized? Will we go to classes to learn how to meditate? Will we use therapists as our teachers? Will psychotherapy and the dharma merge, or stay separate?
 

Domino

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Get. OUT OF HERE.
 

rhinosaur

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I think Zen already has caught on in the West. Ever since the Beat gen started experimenting with and writing about alternative religions, Zen has been popularized by all those books about "The Zen of..." or "Zen and..." Some of my favorites are by Thich Nhat Hanh, who wrote a lot about Zen and Christianity.

I actually know a guy who is or will be studying with Thich Nhat Hanh, and possibly joining some kind of a monastery in France.

I'm not sure about Zen psychotherapy, but I bet my Zen-influenced therapist uncle would have some knowledge about it.
 

Totenkindly

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I just opened my US News and World Reports from this past week and saw an article on "mindfulness" as a stress-release.

Interesting.

I am going to let your expressive bigotry "flow through me," PP, and afterwards I will still be a little soap bubble floating over the meadow.
 
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There's nothing much new about Zen... it's just one more way of connecting with yourself better and then, having made the connection, improving on it, understanding it... meditation... Hinduism (Yoga, Vedanta, certain Right-Hand Tantras), Buddhism (Zen, various Tantras, different -vadas)... then you have the ecstatic and/or devotional cults, Hindu (Bhakti), Christian (Quakers), Muslim (Sufism). This notion that somehow Zen is new to the "West" (whatever that is... different conversation) is strange... Buddhist and the earlier/concurrent Hindu styles of self-questioning and meditation have had parallels in Greek thinking for donkeys' years... the writings of Heraclitus, much of Plato... Gnosticism... none of this is new! Even deconstruction isn't new... Nagarjuna (a Buddhist writer) wrote stuff with very much the same understanding as people in the 20th-21st century.

In the end, most Hindus and Buddhists don't really take advantage of Yogic, Tantric, and Zen meditation techniques... as was written in a scripture (points if you can guess which one):

of a thousand people, maybe one will care to look for knowledge/truth/liberation... of those people who care to look, maybe one out of a thousand of those will actually find out where/how the knowledge/truth/liberation is to be found... and of a thousand of THOSE people who ultimately know where to look, maybe one will actually understand.

_____________________________________________________________________________

I'll soften my bah-humbugging by adding that the field of quantum mechanics is proving very promising... teams of physicists are calling philosophers to work with them on understanding how it might be possible that in perceiving we create... scientists will only be convinced to look at disciplines like Zen (again, not entirely unique, even its aporetic koan style) when their own work has given them cause to believe there may be truth there...

_____________________________________________________________________________
What do you think Zen will look like in the West? Will it be formalized? Will we go to classes to learn how to meditate? Will we use therapists as our teachers? Will psychotherapy and the dharma merge, or stay separate?

Unfortunately, I think the same thing that happened to Yoga and Karate will happen in Europe and America. They will become bowdlerized and the students attempting to learn the disciplines will suddenly spurn the teacher-student relationships and all that goes into learning, for instance, Zen in a place like Japan, thinking they know better. They'll go for talk-therapy and walk home with a koan and think about it. But most will probably refuse to go that extra mile, change their habits, change their entire way of life. They'll drink on Saturday nights and go crazy and then go to "class" on Monday.... I should add something... I don't quite know what you mean by "formalized" in the context of Zen... there are very formal systems in Japan and other countries for the practice of Zen, living and working monasteries, dedicating oneself to a master and his guidance... within that system, Zen is very open and free, not "formal" in that sense, because the practice has to be very individual... so it is both formal and not formal... in America, it may unfortunately be formalized whilst losing the formality which made it work in the past...

As I said before, similar things are happening in the countries of origin.

As Gurdjieff taught, think of knowledge as a material substance... the greater the number of people to whom you disperse it, the less each person gets...
 

Abhaya

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"We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us." -Thomas Merton

Some Zen philosophy from a Trappist Monk. Zen is everywhere, with everyone. It is not confined.
 
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"We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us." -Thomas Merton

Some Zen philosophy from a Trappist Monk. Zen is everywhere, with everyone. It is not confined.

Again... this is not uniquely Zen at all... you can find examples of this kind of thinking everywhere ("nosce te ipsum")... which is probably what Zen masters are trying to say...

the biggest problem with trying to "bring Zen to the West" is that whole point of Zen is often lost in the process.... it's not supposed to be a system that can be packaged and transmitted... it is merely a pointer to THE system, what IS EVERYWHERE... there are many ways of getting to the same place, many pointers...

It's helpful to remember that the word Zen is a corruption of Ch'an which is itself a corruption of the Sanskrit word "dhyaan", meaning meditation.... "dhyaan" was first introduced in the Upanishads, made even more popular and developed further by people like Siddhartha Gautama and Patanjali...

Dhyaan/Dharma, Zen/Dharma, mindfulness... I believe St. John of the Cross described experiences resembling such things.... Americans, Japanese, Indians, Tibetans, Germans, Sudanese, Palestinians, Brazilians, Micronesians.... they all have access to this knowledge, Zen, The Secret, whatever... it's encapsulated in all our cliches and truisms.... ultimately, it's all about whether or not the person in question really commits him/herself to actually following the path or MERELY talking about it...
 

Abhaya

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Don't look at the finger pointing look at the moon! :)
 
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Don't look at the finger pointing look at the moon! :)

Indeed... reading the Dao De Jing is a very good corrective for the kinds of people who go on and on about religion and forget that religion is about re-ligio (to re-unite)... not the means of re-uniting...

though the problem is that whenever one tries to formulate a rule, it backfires...

- :) Don't look at the finger pointing at the moon! It's not about what particular path you take, it's really about where you're going, where you ultimately want to be...

- Ah, but it's not about where you're going, but the going itself... :cool:

- :thinking: So the path we walk is more important than the final destination?

- Yes... the pointing of the finger is, thus, more crucial than actually getting to see the moon. :cool:

- :ng_mad: You... bastard...



P.S. Abhaya... have you lost all fear and, if so, how?
 

ThatsWhatHeSaid

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There's nothing much new about Zen... it's just one more way of connecting with yourself better and then, having made the connection, improving on it, understanding it... meditation... Hinduism (Yoga, Vedanta, certain Right-Hand Tantras), Buddhism (Zen, various Tantras, different -vadas)... then you have the ecstatic and/or devotional cults, Hindu (Bhakti), Christian (Quakers), Muslim (Sufism). This notion that somehow Zen is new to the "West" (whatever that is... different conversation) is strange... Buddhist and the earlier/concurrent Hindu styles of self-questioning and meditation have had parallels in Greek thinking for donkeys' years... the writings of Heraclitus, much of Plato... Gnosticism... none of this is new!

How many practicing Quakers do you know?

Zen, I would argue, has not caught on at all here in the West, and we are just starting to see it open up. Writers like Watts, Leary, Ram Dass, and Suzuki are responsible for its introduction, but only its introduction. The question is: how will it end up taking foot in the West? How will it disseminate and integrate into our culture?

My housemate thinks that Zen will be intellectual (which is not to say that Zen is a philosophy -- I think we're all on the same page about what it is). I think there's some truth in that. Americans also seem to be a little more needy. I think therapy is a good place to start.
 

Anonymous

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I have to admit large ignorance on both Zen and psychotherapy, but this is how I see it. Psychotherapy is for healing, and things like Zen is for enrichment of the already healed. Now I'm not saying that those who have mental troubles can't learn Zen, but it may be a lot more useful for those who already have a healthy mental base to play off of.

So like this

Psychotherapy or equivalent >----------Mentally healthy>----------Zen or equivalent
 

Mercurial

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What do you think Zen will look like in the West? Will it be formalized? Will we go to classes to learn how to meditate? Will we use therapists as our teachers? Will psychotherapy and the dharma merge, or stay separate?

I think it will come on Xbox360 and that we will be able to ride down upon our enemies with it online and make them KNEEL BEFORE ZEN!!!
[rabid foaming]
 
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How many practicing Quakers do you know?

Zen, I would argue, has not caught on at all here in the West, and we are just starting to see it open up. Writers like Watts, Leary, Ram Dass, and Suzuki are responsible for its introduction, but only its introduction. The question is: how will it end up taking foot in the West? How will it disseminate and integrate into our culture?

I actually know several practicing Quakers and a very good K-12 school in New York City (where I live), called Friends Seminary, is founded on Quaker principles, hosting Quaker-style congregational meetings regularly every week. I almost went there and regret, everyday, that I didn't, particularly as I went to one of those every-kid-in-here-is-from-a-stereotypically-wealthy-and-prestigious-Jewish-family type school... the latter ended up being full of snobs who were also quite racist (Jews are the new WASPs in NYC).

As for Zen, how many people do you know actually practicing Zen? And when I say practicing, simply owning a few books on the subject doesn't count... moreover, how many do you think you'd meet in Japan as a percentage of the overall populace?

My housemate thinks that Zen will be intellectual (which is not to say that Zen is a philosophy -- I think we're all on the same page about what it is). I think there's some truth in that. Americans also seem to be a little more needy. I think therapy is a good place to start.

The whole point I was making about Zen, which you seem to have ignored, is that its teachings are not, in that sense, very novel. They're beautifully presented, there's a grand tradition of Zen, and we can all benefit from it. But people in America haven't even learned from the traditions that are native to its soil, or at least flourished there, (like the Quakers or native American philosophy, which environmentalists could have learned a lot from before reinventing the wheel)... or even the European traditions which advocate a reevaluation of all values (yes, copped from Nietzsche himself)... what makes you think that even a significant percentage of Americans will understand or really try to understand Zen? Look at what happened to Yoga! The Yoga tradition, whose roots are Upanishadic, is even older than Buddhism, and advocates the attainment of dhyaan (yes, again, that's where "zen" comes from), and it's devolved into physical exercises! It's not even about Americans... it's about human beings... they generally don't have what it takes to go that far out of their comfort zone... Zen is initially about being made uncomfortable with the way you interact with the world, and then growing more comfortable with yourself and the world... it requires some fair amount of effort, like Yoga...

Deep spirituality is almost like intelligence... it's distributed to a very small percentage of the population... all people can benefit from knowledge, but only a few will ever go onto get PhDs... of those who graduate college, how many really learned anything of lasting value?

Psychotherapy is too dominated by the DSM-IV and textbook learning... it will take a complete departure from current methodology to incorporate anything resembling Zen into psychotherapy.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Beyond all this... I'll stress this... the distinctively Zen-character of Zen teachings can be found in Kabbalah, Vedanta, mystic Christianity, Sufism, and a hundred and one other spiritual and philosophical disciplines around the world. Why should psychotherapy or modern-day medicine explicitly utilize and integrate Zen when it can simply harvest the essential core of all of these traditions and institute secular amendments? Unfortunately, Buddhism too comes with a metaphysics...
 

nolla

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There must be lots of people in humanistic psychology who have been working on this subject. Good place to start.
 

ThatsWhatHeSaid

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I actually know several practicing Quakers

Yeah, they're friggin' everywhere.

As for Zen, how many people do you know actually practicing Zen?

That was my whole point, dude. Not many people practice Zen. I get what you're saying here:

The whole point I was making about Zen, which you seem to have ignored, is that its teachings are not, in that sense, very novel.

But my point wasn't to ask whether there has ever been an experience we can label as "Zen" in the West. The questions was whether and how it would flourish here.

what makes you think that even a significant percentage of Americans will understand or really try to understand Zen? Look at what happened to Yoga!

Yoga's very popular in Los Angeles, which is, to me, a good sign. The mental aspects of yoga are being taught and incorporated into the practice at many yoga studios.

I think people will get into Zen in some form, because it's a natural progression. (It doesn't have to be called Zen, but the EXPERIENCE will be adopted sooner or later.) The natural progression that I'm talking about is hard to pinpoint exactly, but the Self-Help movement seems to be embracing experiences that are connected to Zen in the sense that the notion of well-being is becoming more identified with letting go, acceptance, love, and emotional understanding, rather than accumulation of material assets. As a society, I think we're starting to see the futility of chasing our needs and avoiding our fears. That's the same path Eastern philosophies walk.

The Yoga tradition, whose roots are Upanishadic, is even older than Buddhism, and advocates the attainment of dhyaan (yes, again, that's where "zen" comes from),

FYI, I've studied Buddhism.

It's not even about Americans... it's about human beings... they generally don't have what it takes to go that far out of their comfort zone... Zen is initially about being made uncomfortable with the way you interact with the world, and then growing more comfortable with yourself and the world... it requires some fair amount of effort, like Yoga...

Sure, but I think it can definitely be accomplished. Throwing people out of their comfort zone might take same time and carefully chosen words (or some type of cataclysmic event) but I think it's doable.

Deep spirituality is almost like intelligence... it's distributed to a very small percentage of the population... all people can benefit from knowledge, but only a few will ever go onto get PhDs... of those who graduate college, how many really learned anything of lasting value?

Maybe, but I thought we're talking about POTENTIAL, not just how many people have already attained something?

Psychotherapy is too dominated by the DSM-IV and textbook learning... it will take a complete departure from current methodology to incorporate anything resembling Zen into psychotherapy.

Humanistic, Positive, and Existential Psychology are pretty decent candidates. I can see the DSM IV being revised (fuck, I'll do it) and reframed using Buddhist psychology parameters. Neuroscience is another fertile area that has already started investigating meditation and Zen.

Besides, is the reliance on the DSM really that troublesome? The diagnosis seems less important than the strategy used to assess that diagnosis. In traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, the goal of therapy was to raise the unconscious into the conscious. This requires a certain honesty and investigation and willingness to let things be as they are, rather than disguising them to look more palatable. Wouldn't you agree that Zen uses similar techniques to address mental chatter and noise?

Beyond all this... I'll stress this... the distinctively Zen-character of Zen teachings can be found in Kabbalah, Vedanta, mystic Christianity, Sufism, and a hundred and one other spiritual and philosophical disciplines around the world. Why should psychotherapy or modern-day medicine explicitly utilize and integrate Zen when it can simply harvest the essential core of all of these traditions and institute secular amendments? Unfortunately, Buddhism too comes with a metaphysics...

It doesn't need to embrace ZEN, particularly, just the experience. If I gave the impression that I was talking about a particular path, I apologize.
 

Ivy

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I'm a Quaker lol.
 
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