Sigmund Freud vs. Buddha: Anatta and Ego in the Spiritual Path
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- Опубликовано: 2 июл 2024
- Sigmund Freud and Buddha: Anatta and Ego in the Spiritual Path.
#ego #anatta #freud #buddha #spiritualawakening
Yesterday's podcast, we discussed some of the traditional ways in which the Buddha taught a skillful sense of self - the self as the agent or producer of happiness, and the self as the consumer of happiness - through the development of generosity, virtue, and meditation on goodwill. We also talked about some of the qualities the Buddha recommends for skillfully negotiating with the less skillful members of the mind's committee and motivating them to do the right thing.
Today's talk approaches the same topics from a slightly different angle, looking at them in terms of what modern psychology has to say about mature ego functioning.
Sometimes you hear that the Buddha's teaching on not-self is a teaching on non-ego. This is actually a misunderstanding and it has two unfortunate consequences. The first is that, for those who like the idea of non-ego, it becomes an excuse for self-hatred and for the practice of spiritual bypassing. An example of spiritual bypassing is this: Suppose you have troubles in your life and you don't want to engage in the difficult business of trying to become more mature in dealing with others or negotiating the conflicting desires in your own mind. Instead, you simply go and meditate, you do prostrations, you do chanting, and you hope that those practices will magically make the problems in your life go away. This is called spiritual bypassing - an unskillful way of clinging to habits and practices. As you can imagine, it's not very healthy - and not very effective. People often come back from meditation retreats and they still have the same problems they had before.
The other problem in thinking that Buddhism teaches non-ego is that those who understand the healthy functions of the ego believe that Buddhism lacks a proper appreciation of these functions. They think that Buddhist teachings are incomplete and need help from Western psychology in order to become a complete training of the mind.
Actually, the Buddha's teachings contain all the elements of healthy ego functioning. Even the not-self teaching is treated by the Buddha as a type of healthy ego functioning.
Great video. Keep up the great work everyday it helps so much on this path we are on together. Much appreciated.🙌🏾✌🏾
Thank you ❤️
Top of the morning!
🙏🙏🙏
Hey, great video! It shows good insights and parallels can be brought from Western Psychology in the spiritual path.
But also,As someone who is getting introduced to buddhism, I just don't understand this about the video: If the self/the ego that we cling to is an illusion, if the self is not a "real/fixed entity", then why making so much effort into developing it? Not saying that a healthy sense of self is not better to fruit and develop, or useless, compared to an unskilled and unhealthy sense of self, of course healthy self is much better. But now I'm not understanding what Buddha is teaching in its essence.
Algorithm dropped this channel on my suggested content. In 3 months this channel has created and presented a huge library.
Question to content gererator:
Is this AI generated from the LLM?
While content is informative, the presentation seems FAF.
Start making interviews to prove a human source for the content.
Freud? Who cares?
it's possible to find wisdom from many sources, even when considering one person, like Siddharta Gautama, as the greatest source of it. Wisdom and knowledge are not restricted to a single person or a single branch of people, every intellectual and every person can develop insightful thoughts and theories.
It seems weird that Buddhist love talking about how they don't believe in God but are always praying to a buddah outside oneself. Amitofu??
Humans are human and they vary in their outlook. Even among Buddhists the variations are significant due to the fact that the view of enlightenment isn’t readily available directly to most practitioners. The path towards awakening is gradual for most people and with that comes a gradual deepening of our understandings. But every religion also got fundamental elements in them that most people usually agree on. For Buddhists those are connected with the teachings of the Four Noble Truths by the Buddha for example. The idea of a god that’s responsible for all creations is not taught in the teachings of the Buddha. Beings and phenomena arise and seize in a very different way, according to the Prajnaparamita teachings on Sunyata (emptiness) by the Buddha. But the existence of gods and godly realms are often mentioned in various Sutras. But they are seen as temporary states of beings within samsara and lack the powers to be of any help to us on our way towards liberation from samsara. Hence the disinterest in the worship of such beings by Buddhist practitioners.
A few words on Amitabha Buddha, since you mentioned it. Firstly, any worship of any Buddha should be seen in the light of being the example and the teacher as the basic foundation for our understanding. Not a god. Then, as we progress in our understanding we start to realise the sameness in nature between the Buddha and our own ultimate nature. When we go for refuge in the Buddha we actually taking refuge in our own true and enlightened nature as the ultimate form of refuge. Now, most people outside of Buddhism have only heard about the one and only Shakyamuni Buddha that appeared in this world 2500 years ago. Well, for very many Buddhists practitioners there are an innumerable number of other Buddhas to consider and some if them are even described as having a realm in which they reside. Amitabha Buddha is said to be a so called Adhi Buddha, which means a principle Buddha or archetypical Buddha. Amitabha Buddha is placed in the western gate of the universal mandala and is particularly useful for the transformation of desire and greed into wisdom with ourselves. Praying and making offerings to Amitabha Buddha is in effect purifying our own being especially in relation to our mind of desires and greed. Ultimately, anyone focusing on such practice well enough will bring out ones own Amitabha-nature and thus reach enlightenment. There are innumerable gates to enlightenment and we do not have to go through all of them. To go through just one is sufficient and ALL the wisdoms and qualities of a Buddha will dawn on us. Buddhahood is thus attained and that is an irreversible state, since it’s not a product of anything but our own inherently true nature that have come into fruition.
I suspect this content is AI generated from the LLM, so you must consider the source.
Filter in filter out!