Adam Blatner

Jnana Yoga is the activity of using study, contemplation, thinking, and dialoguing about the spiritual foundations of our life. As I understand it, it should be recognized as a type of spiritual practice. I think this works for me, at least.

My wife and I read together at bedtime—we take turns: one of us flosses and brushes our teeth while the other reads. More recently, we’ve been reading a book about the birth of quantum mechanics in physics, the lives and activities of Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and the others. Many lessons for us to think about. One point is that in this germinal couple of decades that is the focus of much of the book, these people talked together for hours on end— sometimes even for days! They were most active bouncing ideas off of each other, without anyone presuming to be the teacher. It was real dialogue in the face of deep mystery: How indeed do atoms operate? Do they follow the rules of classical (Newtonian) physics, and if not, why not? And also, then how?

While not claiming the brainpower of these folks,  I feel validated by the book, as it helped to validate that there are some people who enjoy thinking and wrestling with ideas. A few decades ago I had not known there was a spiritual discipline that was considered spiritually equal to other forms of ritual worship—but there is: It’s called Jnana Yoga. Then I realized that a similar activity operated in Judaism—the culture of my childhood. In the study centers, the Yeshiva, people would dialogue—well, often for them it took the form of a gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle argument—about the correct interpretation of the Torah, taking into consideration the legends (Midrash) and the other interpretations of Talmudists and commentators, was also a spiritual activity. Wow! There aren’t a lot of models for what I like to do in the modern and post-modern world, but they are there, hidden away in academia and among certain intellectual circles.

I don’t claim that what I enjoy doing is morally or ultimately “better” than what others do. It takes all kinds to make a world. But then again, it isn’t worse, and I need to fend off residues of thoughts that tend to mock my efforts as if there were something wrong with being “intellectual” (as if that were a bad thing), or being on a “head trip,” etc. Actually, I agree with them if what they’re saying is that living a life only of the mind, with no art, music, athletics, romance, etc., were sufficient—but my life is in fact fairly well-rounded.  I grew up thinking that my life of the mind was vaguely self-indulgent and wasteful, but now in my eighth decade, as experience accumulates and within the sunshine and warmth of my wife’s love, I’m enjoying, re-owning, and celebrating the leaping vivacity of my mind. Fun! And, I now realize, useful.

The world needs intellectuals, theoreticians, people who think for fun, and who live in part to think. It’s my fun-est thing, in balance with other life involvements. (Cuddling with Allee and reflecting on how romance is also “real” is another way to stop and smell the roses.)

Part of my life’s story is that I now realize that I’ve been very bright in certain ways in a world that doesn’t recognize or value gifted-ness, and often people like me are misunderstood. I have needed to re-empower a kind of inferiority complex, an interpersonal defensiveness about the fact that I like to browse libraries, read books, think about stuff, seem to others as if I’m “too serious,” and so forth. I used to feel ashamed of this, because being a “bookworm” was really only a fear of the better life of rough-and-tumble athletics (what really good people do). My prowling in used book stores and sitting and reading the inexpensive paperback books garnered from these excursions was only a form of mental masturbation—and evoked a corresponding sense of shame. Real men didn’t have to masturbate. They scored—whatever that meant. Something to do with girlie magazines and being truly masculine and successful. There was absolutely no connection other than in science class between “scoring” and pregnancy, much less any hint of the responsibilities of parenthood. And no one “nice” ever caught a venereal disease.

So what it meant to be mature and grown-up and not a sissy or coward or jerk was conditioned by the mass culture, the movies and general tone of the mid-20th century. I now realize that 74% of those social norms were misleading, often the historical residue mixed with popularization by the mass media conglomerates and the unconscious yearning (i.e., the “market”) that evolved into the mainstream culture and “common sense.” Discovering the pervasiveness of that illusory condition has become my life’s work.

It’s a kind of compensation, perhaps. If I had been cheated and fooled, perhaps I’d become a card-sharp or magician who’d learn all the tricks, all the ways that one could cheat and fool another. I was sickly as a child, so I became a doctor who would help other kids who were sickly.

As a teen, I became caught up in the illusions of mid-20th century America, and some of those are wonderful, and many of them are problematical. Struggling to penetrate the veils of illusion has become a major theme in my life: First, recognizing that my life involves this theme; also, that most people’s lives involve similar issues, sometimes the same illusions, sometimes different ones. Third, what depth psychology is about is just this task, and fourth, it’s quite complicated.

What if half of the “truths” of depth psychology are also illusory, if for no other reason they are taken to be whole truths? We need to recognize that many of our assumptions may be misleading—even in the fields associated with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy—fields aimed at dissolving misleading assumptions. So this makes the problem a little more difficult, but also more valid.

Indeed, can we escape from illusion? I’m inclined to doubt it, recently. Instead, the best thing we can do is to engage in a process of dis-illusion-ment and re-creation, knowing that all we’re aiming for is a more adaptive model for the present moment. In light of anticipated future breakthroughs and discoveries, our present model will doubtless need further revisions. Can we learn to live with the idea that our best coping is based not completely on fact, but also on what our most useful and comprehensive theories may be?

The problem is that our theories are inevitably conditioned not only by more recent experiments, but also by past theories and biases. So teasing out what is useful from what is not can be most complex. Still, that’s the game I choose to play. It’s an exciting and fulfilling intellectual adventure. It serves a wider interpretation of what it means to be a psychiatrist for me—serves the ideal of public health. Can we accurately critique our own culture in the service of liberation from misleading norms and assumptions? I think we can, at least to some degree. And if we fail, we can encourage others who come after us to do likewise and rectify our limitations and mistakes.  Well, enough for today.