International Conference on

Identity StudiesVienna, Austria, Hotel Le Meridien

07/26/14 – 07/27/14

The Psychological Construction of Reality: An Essay in the Buddhist Psychology of Knowledge

Robert Beshara, M.F.A. The University of West Georgia

Sources of inspiration

Identity

Technologies of self-knowledge

Whoam I?

“I’m the f***ing Mona Lisa, bitches!”

In the West, we fetishize the Self via

new technologies

(e.g., smartphones

and social networks)

But is this really a practice of self-knowledge?

Changing the question

Who am I? How am “I” (this body-mind complex in spacetime called Robert)—how am I interbeing with the world?

Or more importantly, who do I want to become?

Deconstructive questions

• What are self and identity, and what is the relationship between them?

• What is the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious?

• What is the relationship between knowledge and wisdom?

• What is the relationship between the body, the mind, and the world?

Self and Identities

Self and Identities:Same idea, different words

• Self and skandhas or aggregates (Buddhist Psychology)

• Self and id, ego, and super-ego (Freudian Psychoanalysis)

• Self and Parts (Internal Family Systems Model or IFS)

• Self and complexes & archetypes (Analytical Psychology)

• Self and subpersonalities (Psychosynthesis)

The Five Skandhas (or aggregates)

1. Form2. Feelings3. Perceptions4. Mental formations5. Consciousness

The decentered subject of Freudian Psychoanalysis

Who we are (consciously and

unconsciously) vs. who we think we

are (e.g., delusions of grandeur).

Richard Schwartz’s IFS Model

According to the IFS model, the Self is a leader like the conductor of an orchestra.

There three main parts identified by Richard Schwartz are:Managers, firefighters, and

exiles.

Carl G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology

The goal of therapy: deconstructing identities to

reconstruct the Self(aka individuation). In other words, who’s in charge here?

Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis

Understanding Our Mind:Key Buddhist concepts

• The Four Noble Truths: suffering, creating suffering, cessation of creating suffering, and the path.

• The Noble Eightfold Path: Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

• The Three Marks of Existence: impermanence, suffering, and non-self.

• The Two Truths Doctrine: Relative Truth and Absolute Truth

Three Kinds of Suffering

1. The suffering of suffering (e.g., the pain of a toothache).

2. The suffering of composite things (i.e., everything decays).

3. The suffering associated with change (aka impermanence): we all grow old, get sick, and die.

Anattā, or non-self

• Non-self means we are empty of a separate self. We do not exist in a vacuum.

• In other words, everything is interconnected—we inter-are.

• A positive restatement of non-self is to call it relational, social, or dialogical Self.

• The Self is empty because it is made up of non-Self elements as I illustrated earlier with the bit on Self and identities.

Right View: Interbeing

“As a practitioner of mindfulness, you look deeply into this flower and you see that it is made only of non-flower elements. There’s a cloud inside also, because if there’s no cloud, there’s no rain and no flower can grow. So you don’t see the form of a cloud, but the cloud is there. And that is the practice of what we call signlessness. You don’t need a sign, a certain form of appearance in order to see it. There’s the sunshine inside. We know that if there is no sunshine, no flower can grow. There is the topsoil inside. Many things are inside: light, minerals, the gardener. It seems that everything in the cosmos has come together to help produce this flower” (Hanh, 2013).

Knowledge vs. wisdom

Oedipus (Aristotle/empiricism/science)

Tiresias (Plato/rationalism/philosophy)

Wisdom and the eye of the mind

Transpersonal Knowing (Hart, Nelson, & Puhakka, 2000) vs. Knowledge

Wisdom Ignorance

Knowing

Past

Present

Non-self(Interbeing)

Separate self

Who you think you are

(consciousness)

Who you are (consciousness + the unconscious)

Ways of Transpersonal Knowing• Examples include: empathic encounters between persons, sexual experiences,

and service.• Mindfulness, as a practice, is one way of transpersonal knowing, where affect,

cognition, and volition can be in harmony. Body and mind are one in the here and the now.

Seeds of mindfulness

(Hanh, 1998, p. 208)

I think therefore I am not. To be or not to be, that is not the question.

Theses

• The Self is a paradox. It is an illusion; nevertheless, a useful one (e.g, self-leadership).

• We have multiple identities not just one; they shouldn’t be in charge.

• A transdisciplinary psychology ought to look at the interactions between the body, the mind, and the world.

• We need not only knowledge (science) but also wisdom (philosophy) if we are to survive as a species, which is a call for secular ethics--a new mythos perhaps?

The Self Illusion:The Self as an organizing principle

The mind-body problem & the hard problem of consciousness

The 3rd substance as Ultimate Reality

Electromagnetism as a metaphor for bodymind

Why do we need a Self? The Mirror Stage

Healthy narcissism of the modern neurotic

Auto-eroticism vs. self-reflection

Self-reflection as vanity (think selfies) vs. the mirror as “a symbol of the power of reflection to modify

desire (Booth, 2008, p.95), which perhaps distinguishes us from other animals?

Self-leadership:The Self as a conductor

Towards a transdisciplinary psychology:Body, mind, and world

Mind ≠ Brain

Body ≠ perfect European man (e.g., the Vitruvian Man)

World ≠ the Americas

What is mind?

• “Mind is defined in Buddhism as a non-physical phenomenon which perceives, thinks, recognizes, experiences and reacts to the environment.”

• “The two main types of mind are explained as the conceptual and the non-conceptual. The conceptual is the "normal" mind aspect we use to survive in daily life, but is ultimately mistaken about the way in which reality exists. The non-conceptual type of mind is also called the Buddha nature […] fundamental pure nature of mind which realizes emptiness.”

Source: http://viewonbuddhism.org/mind.html

The dualistic nature of language:Or how we reify our Selves

• “Lightning strikes”• A similar principle is at work when it comes to

selfhood, or psychological reality in general. When we say “I,” we reify ourselves, and we separate ourselves from the Other, which is the subject-object problem in Western philosophy.

• Can consciousness exist without an observer?

The myth of individualism

Governments, corporations, and the mass media will have us believe that we are incredibly unique so that we do not stop

consuming, be that in the form of purchasing a product or casting a

vote.

(individualism vs. individuation, which is a

transpersonal concept that has to do with integration)

Context is everything:Self vis-à-vis society

In the West, the Copernican revolution was a paradigm shift

that resulted in the decentering of the Self

among other things

Our relationship with the world:Cosmology as a metaphor for the Self

The geocentric model

The heliocentric model

The cult of celebrity: In contemporary mythology, we worship celebrities, whom we view as demigods. No wonder why we call them ‘stars.’ Perhaps, we ought

to come up with an alternative system of secular ethics in place of the god of capitalism?

ECOCENTRISM The next developmental stage in our evolution?

Premodernity => modernity => postmodernity => transmodernity

Egocentrism => Ethnocentrism => Worldcentrism/Ecocentrism/Biocentrism

Essentialism and performativity

• “All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages” – from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Free will vs. determinism

• How can we reconcile biological determinism with freedom of choice?

• The Buddhist answer is pragmatic: we work with the givens, and so beyond free will and determinism, we try to liberate ourselves from suffering through understanding (transpersonal knowing) to achieve greater freedom; after all, creativity is about working within limitations.

Conclusion• Our Self and identities are not only socially

constructed, they are also psychologically constructed.• SC can help us understand how our Self and identities

are socially constructed, while Buddhist Psychology can help us understand how they are psychologically constructed.

• Said psychosocial understanding can only be the result of a marriage between knowledge and wisdom/knowing (e.g., mindfulness), especially if we want to become empowered as individuals in society, that is, if we want to practice our freedom of choice in performing any act we desire without being delusional about who we are.

Conclusion (CONT’D)

• In other words, we are not who we think we are: we are not our bodies and we are not our minds, souls, or spirits. Rather, we are bodyminds interbeing with the world in the here and the now.

• Think of the liberating potential of the current framework in terms of individual transformation and social change.

The other side:Mirrors and reflections in contemporary art

At Belvedere till October 12th, 2014

From the exhibition