Offering Description
Turning Eastward: Explorations in East-West Psychology
Description
Western psychology has so far failed to provide us with asatisfactory understanding of the full range of human experience.It has largely overlooked the core of human understanding—oureveryday mind, our immediate awareness of being with all of itsfelt complexity and sensitive attunement to the vast network ofinterconnectedness with the universe around us. Instead Westernpsychology has chosen to analyze the mind as though it were anobject independent of the analyzer, consisting of hypotheticalstructures and mechanisms that cannot be directly experienced.Western psychology’s neglect of the living mind—both in itseveryday dynamics and its larger possibilities—has led to atremendous upsurge of interest in the ancient wisdom of the East,particularly Buddhism, which does not divorce the study ofpsychology from the concern with wisdom and human liberation.
In direct contrast, Eastern psychology shuns any impersonalattempt to objectify human life from the viewpoint of an externalobserver, instead studying consciousness as a living reality whichshapes individual and collective perception and action. The primarytool for directly exploring the mind is meditation or mindfulness,an experiential process in which one becomes an attentiveparticipant-observer in the unfolding of moment-to-momentconsciousness.
Learning mainly from lectures, readings, videos, workshops,seminar discussions, individual and group research projects, andfield trips, we will take a critical look at the basic assumptionsand tenets of the major currents in traditional Western psychology,the concept of mental illness, and the distinctions drawn betweennormal and abnormal thought and behavior. We will then investigatethe Eastern study of mind that has developed within spiritualtraditions, particularly within the Buddhist tradition. In doingso, we will take special care to avoid the common pitfall of mostWestern interpretations of Eastern thought—the attempt to fitEastern ideas and practices into unexamined Western assumptions andtraditional intellectual categories. Lastly, we will address theencounter between Eastern and Western psychology as possibly havingimportant ramifications for the human sciences in the future,potentially leading to new perspectives on the whole range of humanexperience and life concerns.
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