Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

SPIRITUALITY VERSUS PSYCHOTHERAPY VERSUS MEDICATIONS

PART ONE: SETTING THE STAGE FOR AUTHENTIC HEALING AND AWAKENING

Because I am back into the field of psychology, and have been reacquainting myself with therapy and psychotropic medications, I will be writing frequently about how psychology, psychopharmacology, and the pursuit of peace, enlightenment, wisdom, and Self-Realization, all fit together.

I first began my spiritual career through self-study of Zen and Ramana Maharshi in about 1966, almost 50 years ago.  I have lived in or been a member of endless Zen, Tibetan, Kundalini, Vedantic and other centers for at least 30 of those years.  I have treated people with psychological problems such as depression, manic-depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and schizophrenia directly for maybe 20 years, and for 30 years I have been a consultant to psychiatrists and psychologists defending their treatment of individuals according to ethical and medical standards for the court system.

I have also taught Zen and Self-Realization spirituality at the Extensions at UCLA, UCSD, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara.  I was a teaching monk at the International Buddhist Meditation Center for years, and studied under six Zen masters learning hundreds if not thousands of koans and their answers.  Finally, I spent eight years with Robert Adams—a student of Ramana Maharshi—and five with Jean Dunn, one of two disciples that Nisargadatta named as successors.

During this almost 50 years of exposure to these diverse spirituality modalities and psychotherapies, I have been exposed to many, many thousands of people walking one path or another and have reached many conclusions, the most important of which is as follows.

Most people walking spiritual path do so as a result of psychological problems and the mistaken belief that spirituality can resolve psychological problems.  For them, they hold the false idea that if they were to awaken, all mood disorders such as anxiety and depression would disappear, as well as fear, such as fear of losing a loved one, or fear of death itself.  They also pursue enlightenment to increase self-esteem, decrease pessimistic and obsessive thinking, while others suffering from pre-psychotic or frankly psychotic intrusions of other-worldly states, visions, visitations from entities, hallucinations, hearing voices, or else being hyper-aware and bother by noises, smells, light, and energetic currents, seek respite through meditation, Kundalini, Chi-Gong, or other practices.

However, “awakening” and enlightenment have nothing to do with resolving psychological problems.  It works in entirely different spheres, yet people, out of fear of engaging in psychotherapy or taking psychotropic medications, spend years self-treating through spiritual practices, or reading about various famed spiritual teachers such as Ramana Maharshi, Rama Krishna, Krishnamurti, U.G. Krishnamurti, etc., and try to emulate or attain through book-learning what they think these teachers have attained, whether it be peace of mind, enlightenment, bliss, or total, benign indifference to suffering in this world.

But relief from major psychological distress and suffering cannot be obtained through typical spiritual practices except for one way: learning how to observe one’s thinking and emotions.  Self-observation can create a psychological distance between a person’s sense of self and the distressing symptoms they want to end.  They wall off their sense of self from the intrusive emotional and even physical pain.

Unfortunately, after a while, users of this technique often find they have walled off portions of their own self, from themselves, and are no longer fully functioning people without a full-spectrum of emotional richness, and without a wide range of human interactions, enjoyments, and ability to feel and to tolerate both joy and suffering.

Go to any coffee shop and you will invariably find cadres of people obsessively reading the Bible and taking notes.  They often sit together and hold Bible study classes in Starbucks or Coffee Bean establishments.

Christianity is a religion of learning how to tolerate suffering and overcoming fear of death through belief in a benevolent God in the form of God the Father and God the Son, to whom you give your suffering, and the belief if you lead a good and moral life you will live in heaven forever, free from suffering, and living in joy at Christ’s side.  For some this holding onto belief—Faith—actually works for a time, and sometimes for a long time and even a life time.  Others, not so much.

Buddhism in its original Theravadin form is profoundly pessimistic, holding that life itself is suffering, but there is a way out of suffering and that is the Eightfold path or right thinking, right living, contemplation, meditation, etc.

For most with energy gurus and many New Age spiritualities, the path usually consists to trying to attain permanently altered states of mind, such as endless bliss, joy, internal energies, Sahaja or Nirvakalpa Samadhis, where you forever dwell in states of endless bliss, peace that passes by understanding, or one dwells in the Void, emptiness, or pure awareness, the pure I Am, or some other state.  Many do obtain such states that last a long, long time, and are sustained through constant practice, mindfulness, etc.

Examples of this are the energy gurus who claim to have attained constant bliss such as many of Muktananda’s swamis, Hari Krishna swamis, the author of The Most Rapid Means to Eternal Bliss, Michael Langford, Jan Esmann, and many others, who practice Kundalini, pranayama, visualizations, and other exercises for many years in order to awaken one’s Kundalini energies and keep it awake.  Another is Eric Pepin who teaches mostly about navigating through various astral states and energy fields.

However, feeling bliss does not really resolve psychological problems, it is just that their experience is mitigated by the feeling of bliss.  Some of these energy teachers can become profoundly narcissistic and even frankly psychotic, such as Da Free John and Osho as he decompensated into frank psychosis after long-term extreme drug use. Muktananda himself died as a result of too-fast withdrawal from Valium which causes a plummeting of his blood pressure and heart failure.

I know this previous paragraph will draw huge amounts of critical comments from  former students of these teachers, as well as readers of these teachers who hold onto belief that these figures were the greatest, happiest, and wisest of beings, when in fact, many were closing in on insanity in the form of malignant narcissism. 

As my  own primary teacher, Robert Adams, said, “Insanity and enlightenment walk hand in hand.” Robert himself was profoundly withdrawn from  life and the world, finding profound peace by ignoring the world, its suffering, and activities.

This is the first introductory post on founding a truly integrated modality of healing psychological problems and finding awakening to one’s own self, or Self-Realization to both the Manifest Human Self, and to the Self as the ultimate Witness.

I will post about medications and the unfounded fears that people have about medications, such that they foster dependency, make you into a zombie, make you feel that you are sick, that therefore something is very wrong with you, further reducing self-esteem, or the belief that psychotherapy (and drugs) are a crutch, and no self-respecting person should ever seek help from a therapist, or from medications, and that one should  only life oneself by one’s own bootstraps.  This is pure poppycock.

I myself, as admitted above, have submitted myself not only do many spiritual teachers over 50 years, but also to eight years of twice a week psychotherapy in several different modalities, from Gestalt to psychoanalysis (4 X week), taken medications for depression and for anxiety, and have practiced and taught many types of meditation and of self-inquiry.  I still take a sleeping pill, sometimes several, to get to a deep sleep state because sleep apnea otherwise makes deep and REM sleep impossible.

In addition, the deep sleep, dream, and waking are all temporary states that come and go as they will,and are all affected by the health of the body as well as how long and well one has progressed in meditation.

Over the next few months I want to give you insights gained after having done it all for a half century.  I want to tell you what works, what does not, what practices or beliefs actually make for more suffering or delusion than the disorder one is trying to overcome.

Like I said near the beginning, most people practicing or even interested in spirituality, are doing so to escape suffering, and usually as an escape from psychological suffering such as depression, manic-depression, severe anxiety or persistent fears of death or pther events, escape from a pervading dread of the worst happening, low self-esteem, psychotic phenomena, or from physical pain, or even “imagined” of psychogenic pain.

These people want to do it all themselves and not take psychotropic medications, see therapists, or even go to  a spiritual teacher.  They think they can resolve their dis-ease and distress purely through the mind, book learning, self-talk, positive affirmations, belief in the Bible or Buddha, Christ or Osho, or Krishnamurti.

These people do not have any idea of how complex the problems of psychological pain and suffering are, and the many, many ways there are to resolve the suffering, but the fears of following those methods prevents true relief of that suffering.

As a taste, I will  say only one thing, one hint of what is to come.  Medication cannot resolve a deep depression, if anything, it will worsen it by divorcing yourself from feeling even more than the depression does.  The moist effective way out of depression is a combination of medication and appropriate psychotherapy.  This holds true for other mood disorders, such as manic-depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, obessional disorders, and even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I certainly cannot give all the answers to resolving these disorders all by yourselves, because even major depressive disorders have many different causes, and it takes a good medical evaluation to best determine the way to mitigate this type of suffering.  But psychotropic medications can often assist the spiritual seeker by freeing them of a depression, anxiety state, violent mood swings that undermine our ability to be steadfast and persistent in any successful spiritual practice.

Also, as an additional understanding I want to convey, it is almost impossible to lift yourself out of a Major Depressive Episode without psychotropic medications or psychotherapy.  It literally cannot be done through spiritual methods.

Often Major Depressive Episodes end just by the passage of time, as do strong periods of deep anxiety and panic disorders, but each untreated episode changes brain function and neurologic chemistry to the extent that there is a much higher chance of subsequent episodes, and each new episode further changes brain function and chemistry until the disorder can become chronic, and no longer requires an external trigger, such as death of a loved one or loss of a job or home.