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. <\/p>\n
My wife and I read together at bedtime\u2014we take turns: one of us flosses and brushes our teeth while the other reads. More recently, we\u2019ve 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\u2014 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? <\/p>\n
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\u2014but there is: It\u2019s called Jnana Yoga. Then I realized that a similar activity operated in Judaism\u2014the culture of my childhood. In the study centers, the Yeshiva, people would dialogue\u2014well, often for them it took the form of a gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle argument\u2014about 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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t claim that what I enjoy doing is morally or ultimately \u201cbetter\u201d than what others do. It takes all kinds to make a world. But then again, it isn\u2019t worse, and I need to fend off residues of thoughts that tend to mock my efforts as if there were something wrong with being \u201cintellectual\u201d (as if that were a bad thing), or being on a \u201chead trip,\u201d etc. Actually, I agree with them if what they\u2019re saying is that living a life only of the mind, with no art, music, athletics, romance, etc., were sufficient\u2014but 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\u2019s love, I\u2019m enjoying, re-owning, and celebrating the leaping vivacity of my mind. Fun! And, I now realize, useful. <\/p>\n
The world needs intellectuals, theoreticians, people who think for fun, and who live in part to think. It\u2019s my fun-est thing, in balance with other life involvements. (Cuddling with Allee and reflecting on how romance is also \u201creal\u201d is another way to stop and smell the roses.) <\/p>\n
Part of my life\u2019s story is that I now realize that I\u2019ve been very bright in certain ways in a world that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019m \u201ctoo serious,\u201d and so forth. I used to feel ashamed of this, because being a \u201cbookworm\u201d 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\u2014and evoked a corresponding sense of shame. Real men didn\u2019t have to masturbate. They scored\u2014whatever 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 \u201cscoring\u201d and pregnancy, much less any hint of the responsibilities of parenthood. And no one \u201cnice\u201d ever caught a venereal disease. <\/p>\n
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 \u201cmarket\u201d) that evolved into the mainstream culture and \u201ccommon sense.\u201d Discovering the pervasiveness of that illusory condition has become my life\u2019s work. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a kind of compensation, perhaps. If I had been cheated and fooled, perhaps I\u2019d become a card-sharp or magician who\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s lives involve similar issues, sometimes the same illusions, sometimes different ones. Third, what depth psychology is about is just this task, and fourth, it\u2019s quite complicated. <\/p>\n
What if half of the \u201ctruths\u201d 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\u2014even in the fields associated with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy\u2014fields aimed at dissolving misleading assumptions. So this makes the problem a little more difficult, but also more valid. <\/p>\n
Indeed, can we escape from illusion? I\u2019m 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\u2019re 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? <\/p>\n
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\u2019s the game I choose to play. It\u2019s an exciting and fulfilling intellectual adventure. It serves a wider interpretation of what it means to be a psychiatrist for me\u2014serves 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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