CHAPTER FOUR

THE INTERFACE
BETWEEN MEDITATION AND
PSYCHOTHERAPY

I. MODERN AND ANCIENT VISIONS OF NEUROSIS

When his book, Psychotherapy East and West,1 appeared in 1961,

Alan Watts remarked that “if we look deeply into such ways of life
as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find
either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West.
We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy.”
Conversely, Jacob Needleman in The New Religions2 used this
broad expression in a way encompassing characteristic therapeu-
tic developments of the “New Age.”
It is true that certain statements or actions are better desig-
nated either as “therapeutic” or “spiritual” and yet it cannot be
denied that both the spiritual endeavor and the therapeutic are
concerned with the self-same ultimate goal of removing the
obscuration of the human ego, so that the full expression of the
person’s potentialities may unfold.
I don’t use the word “ego” here in the meaning of ego-
psychology, but as is commonly used in both the popular and the

63
64 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

transpersonal languages in which it is usually viewed as the

counterpart of the Self or Being. I don’t make a distinction
between calling this pain-perpetuating system of conditioned
responses “neurosis,” “samsara,” “sinfulness,” “fallenness” or
“consciousness degradation.”
Two systems may be distinguished within our body/mind: the
total system, and a sub-system that asserts its separateness
through consciousness barriers. The latter—call it ego, neurotic
self or what you will—is a sort of mind-parasite that absorbs our
life-energy and limits the expression of our potential.
Traditional spirituality has pointed to “ignorance,” at the
core of consciousness degradation, and viewed ignorance
(avidya) as a darkening and confusion of the mind that renders it
unable to sustain spiritual consciousness. Rather than interesting
itself in the loss of the gnostic capacity of the mind, psycho-
therapy has addressed consciousness degradation in terms of the
loss or distortion of a more worldly kind of awareness: the
awareness of the obvious and the here and now, which includes
the awareness of sensate and emotional, of our thoughts and of
what we are doing with our life. Yet both traditions address only
different levels of the consciousness issue, and coincide in seeing
a loss of consciousness as a major factor in suffering.
Another pillar in the dysfunctional condition of the mind
may be conceived as an over-desiring or excessive dependence on
the satisfaction of desires. Buddhism calls this tanha, usually
translated as craving, or sometimes simply as “desire.”
Along with the obscuration of the subtle or contemplative
mind and interference with self-experience and self-understand-
ing, we may say that neurosis is also under the rule of deficiency-
motivation. It may be argued that it is usually of deficiency-
motivation that therapists speak when they use the word “libido,”
and I prefer to distinguish the libido of our over-desiring, passion-
ate, sinful, or sick nature from the abundance of Eros. While eros
(the life force or instinct) is abundance, libido, the degraded form
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 65

of eros, is anti-instinctual and constitutes the material out of

which is fashioned the straight jacket in which instinct is con-
tained.
Over-desiring corresponds to what in psychoanalytic lan-
guage is called orality, and generally speaking, it may be said that
we are fixated on an oral attitude that was healthy during the
earliest part of our life and now has become an obsolete immatu-
rity and a source of pain.
It has been a merit of psychotherapy to elucidate how the
fixation on the condition of “oral” attachment has become
established as an alarm reaction to frustration in early life. Oral
greed in the adult is—according to Freud, Abraham et al.—the
result of frustration of oral impulses in the past. More specifically,
over-desiring is seen to echo the frustration of our yearning for
mother’s breast during infancy. Yet insight into oral-receptive-
ness has not prevented a hedonistic bias in modern psycho-
therapy, which I think has resulted from the traditional emphasis
on austerity.
To speak of desire in its broadest sense is to speak of both
desire and counter-desire; that is to say: desire and aversion. And
to say that in the endarkened condition there is slavery to both
desire and aversion may be re-worded into saying that we are not
only excessively oral-receptive, but fixated in an excessively
frustrated and angry “oral-aggressive” attitude: it is as if the biting
response that followed our sucking response in infancy had
persisted too much, turning into our present biting attitude
toward others, ourselves and even Heaven; as if in our present
hatefulness we were seeking to get even for our original love-
frustration through an excessive active reaching-out that psycho-
analysis has called “cannibalistic.”
Buddhism speaks of a triad of core factors in the endarkened
condition, to which it refers as “the three poisons”: greed,
aversion and ignorance. This, in turn, may be reworded by stating
that at the core of neurosis there is an interplay of desire and
66 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

aversion (“love” and hate) in the field of an active unconscious-

ness—a lowering of consciousness that seems to involve the
preference for the status quo through attachment to a meager
level of satisfaction (in view of an avoidance of the possibility of
greater dissatisfaction).
The view of modern psychology is also congruent with the
view of the old traditions in the recognition that mind-deteriora-
tion is not a cognitive and emotional process alone. The fall is
“karmic,” and to some extent hereditary. The world of the mind,
like that of nature, operates according to strict causality, and in
the causal chain of events the weight of the past impinges on the
present.
Traditional spirituality has emphasized the karma of earlier
and forgotten lifetimes. The therapeutic tradition, conversely,
emphasizes the equally forgotten or unconscious impingement of
the early environment on the developing child. I wonder how
much of what traditionally has been ascribed to the unknown pre-
individual past may correspond to the equally unknown forgot-
ten past of childhood, in the course of which the child psyche is
formed, in the context of relationship to the mind of its parents.
Of course, psychotherapy mostly echoes the traditional rec-
ognition that there is a going from here to there: a healing
process. From the point of view of conditioning, the healing of
neurosis needs to involve a measure of transcendence of (or a
relative freedom vis-a-vis) the body: a death to the past. From the
point of view of emotion, the way may be characterized as a shift
from greed and need, to love—i.e., from deficiency to abundance
motivation. Psychotherapy and the wisdom traditions alike, how-
ever, have stressed the pursuit of consciousness: a recovery of
physical, emotional and cognitive awareness, amounting to a
recovery of the capacity to experience. I imagine that at least
some therapists today would be open to the notion that the
healing process may culminate in the healing of the subtler
cognition that makes spiritual awareness (gnosis or wisdom)
possible.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 67

The old mystery of death/re-birth, known to the initiates of

all traditions, is being rediscovered today as it becomes increas-
ingly clear that the most successful therapy involves an ego-death
process (brought about through insight) that makes possible the
ever-widening unfolding of healthy life.
Another aspect that the old traditions and therapy are in
agreement about is the critical role of the helping relationship in
personal development. What we today call therapeutic has been
part of the role of teachers or priests in various traditions, though
teacher-student interactions have occurred only in an oral-aural
domain that has been scarcely documented. Zalman Schachter
has devoted a book to the subject3 in the Hassidic tradition, and
it is possible to form some idea of how Sufi masters dealt with
some well known human quirks through books such as Shah’s
Thinkers of the East.4
With these considerations as background, I now turn to the
more specific subject announced through this chapter’s title: the
interface between meditation and psychotherapy.
Surely, meditation has come to be the most important
method of transpersonal psychology, and meditation practitio-
ners frequently seek psychotherapeutic help, at least at some
point in their development—but where, in what, or how do
meditation and psychotherapy meet? Asking about the interface
between meditation and psychotherapy means understanding
what processes are common to both. By extension, it may involve
contributing to a general or unified theory of meditation and
psychotherapy.
I will be carrying out the inquiry through an application to
psychotherapy of such concepts as have emerged from my reflec-
tions concerning meditation, for the converse is less illuminating:
to look at meditation in terms of the processes involved in
psychotherapy soon reveals that the more unique aspects of
psychotherapy are intrinsically interpersonal.
Thus meditation involves awareness practice, and awareness
of the here and now naturally leading to insight—both worldly
68 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

and, possibly, even metaphysical. Though nobody can be aware

for another—still one person’s self-awareness and his or her
intuition of another may combine into an ability to assist the
development of another’s awareness and insight. Self-awareness
and self-knowledge, which are functions of a person’s inner
development, seem to be endowed with a certain “infectious-
ness”; however, this is one of the factors operating in therapeutic
groups, and is ever more striking in the case of the specially wise
individuals who can be enlightening mirrors to others with a
minimum of words, seemingly through presence alone.
The same is true of the individual’s development of healthy
love of self—without which compassion becomes hypocritical
and no real path is possible. Whatever development in the love of
self and others may come from traditional spiritual practice and
whatever help may arise from psychological insight, being in
relation to a loving person is always of help, and sometimes the
only way out of “walking in circles.” Just as a fortunate person
learns to accept and value his/her self under the protective
umbrella of mother’s love, one who has been devoured by a
hateful ego may be rescued in adult life through the experience of
relating to a truly benevolent guide.
As I will be arguing, an important aspect of therapy is the
restoration of spontaneity, and here too, the presence of another
may induce in the individual a greater measure in surrender than
could be possible in isolation. To go beyond his present limits a
person may not only need to be reassured and cared for, but also
the stimulus of a contagion in inner freedom may come about
through a subtle modeling.
All this may be summarized as “the magic of the other,” and
to this is added, in the helping relationship, a factor of know-how,
comprising professional methods and strategies. Furthermore,
there is in the healing relationship a factor of creativity and
inspiration on the part of the therapist or guide which, like the
factor of interpersonal contagion, cannot be reduced to such
notions as I have elaborated upon while theorizing on meditation.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 69

After this proviso, then, I turn to a consideration of what in

psychotherapy can be understood in terms similar to those of
meditation.
I have always been keenly aware of how psychotherapy is
always more than what it purports to be. Real psychotherapy is
eminently an art, and it always does more than what is explicit in
the mind of its practitioners. Just as life may contain our theories
and not be exhausted by them, psychotherapy, I think, vastly
transcends the theories of psychotherapists. In view of the situa-
tion it seems most appropriate to inquire into how psychotherapy
may appear in light of the concepts about the path of transforma-
tion, concepts that seem congruent with practices that have
proved their efficacy across the centuries.

II. PSYCHOTHERAPY IN LIGHT OF

THE SIX COMPONENTS OF MEDITATION

1) Mindfulness and creative imagination

As I turn to a consideration of psychotherapy in light of the

proposed model of meditation, I begin with the issue of attention.
Meditation, we saw, involves attention—not only when we pay
attention to the contents of the mind in the here and now (as in
vipassana), but where we focus our attention on symbols, colors,
forms or concepts evocative of ultimate reality and sacredness.
It is clear to which end of the mindfulness/God-mindedness
dimension psychotherapy gravitates. Increasingly, throughout its
history, psychotherapy has involved the recognition of the heal-
ing potential of awareness. While Freudian insight involved
mostly the recovery of full awareness of the past and awareness of
what the person is doing in his life of relationships, its interest
shifted more and more to an awareness of the therapeutic
(transferential) relationship, and to a consideration of the rel-
evance of non-verbal awareness. Along with these, there devel-
70 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

oped (first in Gestalt therapy and then more generally) an appre-

ciation for the healing virtue of awareness in itself, beyond
specific contents. The pervasiveness of body therapies and the
introduction of bio-feedback as complements to verbal therapies
reflect the importance given to simple awareness by those who
help others to grow emotionally; it may be said that without the
grounding of the sensate here and now, it is easy to fantasize
instead of acknowledging one’s true emotional reality.
Yet while both mindfulness and God-mindedness are impor-
tant in giving an account of meditation experience, it is not so in
the field of psychotherapy, in which the increasing recognition of
the importance of awareness has not been matched by com-
parable consensus on the therapeutic implications of God-
mindedness. In spite of the transpersonal tendency and the
spiritualization of psychotherapy, spiritual experience in our
secular therapeutic tradition has been under-played, both as a
therapeutic factor and as an aspect of therapeutic unfolding.
Religiosity declined in the modern world when the strictures
of the patriarchal church inhibited mysticism; and when tran-
scending authoritarianism involved throwing out the baby (i.e.
God-mindedness) with the bath water.
Yet not only are religious experiences important to healing; a
religious view can also make a difference, and should not be
incompatible with self-knowledge or behavior modification. It is
not the same for the individual to regard himself as one seeking
relief from pain and help from another, or to understand his pain
as something that exists in the context of a condition of obscura-
tion and a estrangement from reality, and who sees himself in a
journey to a sacred goal.
Surely the Christian understanding became so contaminated
that we now need to put the old wine into new barrels, and if we
look for God-mindedness in psychotherapy, we find it, for
instance, in the Jungian approach; for under the notion of
archetypes Jung may be said to have smuggled religion into the
West under scientific garb.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 71

An old rabbi used to advise filling one’s head with God as a

preparation toward an eventual experience of the divine, and it
may be similarly said that filling one’s head with the lives of the
Greek gods or with alchemical symbolism (on occasion of inter-
pretation of one’s dreams) likewise contributes to eventual expe-
riences in the domain thus symbolized. Yet the Jungian process is
often all too detached and intellectual, and its power to bring
sacredness into the therapeutic process rather limited when
compared to traditional spiritual contexts. The same might be
said of psycho-synthesis or other work with archetypal imagery:
though archetypes are essentially sacred symbols or symbols of
sacredness, a desacralizing scientific distance is implied in their
very conception as “organs of the psyche’s collective uncon-
scious.” Bringing God-mindedness to psychotherapy will neces-
sarily mean, above all, bringing sacredness into the person’s life
and path, and for one with a faith, nothing could be better than
the attempt to “remember” God. Not only can this be compatible
with the rest of the therapeutic endeavor, but the individual’s
sense of the divine will always add something to his horizon,
widening somewhat the context of whatever the situation was
without it.
While traditional contributions to God-mindedness are per-
fectly compatible as complements to psychotherapy, it is also
true that they are not so congruent with the intellectual climate
of our secular world. It is easier to engender the sense of the
divine in our minds if we have the support of faith, and faith is
harder to sustain in our increasingly materialistic contemporary
culture. Perhaps it would behoove us to adopt the attitude of
some practitioners in Tibetan Buddhism who know quite well
the extraordinary powers of the Gods and yet recognize that
they are creations of the mind. But “creation” here is a com-
pletely different matter from imagination; for imagination only
serves as a support for such potential of the human mind,
which Corbin, in his account of Ibn ’Arabi, calls “creative
imagination.”
72 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

Idries Shah used the expression “constructive conception”

for ways of viewing, the truth of which lies not in an earlier state
of affairs but in the result of their being embraced. Thus in the
teaching tale of Mushkil Gusha, a wood-cutter is told by a voice
to close his eyes and climb certain steps before him. He is standing
alone in a forest, and knows very well that there are no such steps;
yet as he climbs, the steps arise under his feet and he finds himself
in a completely different place—from which he then returns
enriched. So it is in our inner life: when we assume something to
be the case, this makes a difference in our experience and in the
unfolding of events. Such is the truth of oracles, too, which work
for us when we take them to be true.
But aside from simple faith (and considerations on the reality
of sacralization beyond any particular form or belief), I think the
most powerful resource toward God-mindedness today may be—
as it was in shamanistic cultures—music—or rather, music when
intentionally used as a form of devotion, as is further explained in
Chapter 7.

2) Spontaneity and mental discipline in psychotherapy

I now turn to a consideration of the therapeutic relevance of

what I have called the stop/go dimension of meditation and of the
mind.
It is apparent from the outset that here again psychotherapy
capitalizes on one end of the continuum, for the issue of impulse
liberation is much more apparent in it than that of mind-control.
Since Freud, to speak of psychotherapy has been more or less
equivalent to speaking of “a talking cure”—i.e., a healing process
mediated by verbal communication; also, the gist of such commu-
nication therapy has been, from the very beginning, an attempt to
let go of conditioned and social limitations. As the discipline
matured, it became increasingly conscious of its being a “path of
authenticity.”
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 73

It is of interest to note that the original impulse to the

development of psychotherapy in the modern world came from
Mesmer, since Freud’s first interest was in hypnosis. There was
more to Mesmer’s cures than hypnotic trance, however, for these
came about through an invitation to surrender to a healing force.
No matter how inconvenient, such surrender served as an occa-
sion for the individual’s self-healing potential to come into
operation. It was from the flow of spontaneous ideation in
hypnosis that Freud derived the technique of free-association
that—itself an implicit expression of the principle of spontane-
ity—constituted the background of psychoanalytic develop-
ments.
After Freud, the cultivation of spontaneity may be said to
have been carried forward on two fronts. Moreno describes
psycho-synthesis as a deliberate education in spontaneity, and
Reich went a step beyond Freud in his belief of the full liberation
of instinct and in his emphasis on sexual liberation. Later still
came Gestalt and other existential therapies, along with the more
radical notion of therapy that is accomplished through genuine-
ness and a willingness to surrender to inner processes, trusting
their intrinsic wisdom rather than attempting to control them.
From an important point of view, then, psychotherapy may
be regarded as an assisted liberation from the barriers of the ego
through yielding to “organismic” self-regulation, and it seems
valid, then, to say that psychotherapy has, throughout its history,
healed many of its clients through the liberation of their sponta-
neity.
While in the field of meditation it is clear that both learning
to let go and learning to develop a disciplined and one-pointed
calm are prominent spiritual practices, in the realm of therapy the
Dionysian element is much more prominent than the Apollonian.
While “Peace of Mind” is a widely acknowledged goal of mental
health, its formulation hardly takes into account anything compa-
rable to the “mental control” involved in the cultivation of one-
74 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

pointedness. Except for an appreciation of relaxation as an

antidote for stress, the idea of impulse-control as a part of therapy
seems to have gone out of the window along with God-minded-
ness in our days of modern secularism and post-Victorian instinc-
tual liberation.
Since the modern West discovered the right and freedom to
seek one’s happiness, it has—not without reason—disdained
preachers of virtue. Nietzsche, the greatest advocate of the
Dionysian spirit in the modern world, preached against preachers
of “virtue,” proclaiming them to be preachers of comfort in
disguise. Unfortunately, however, “virtue” itself has been deni-
grated after their fall, as if suspected to be nothing other than a
tool of authoritarian manipulation. Yet this has been another case
of throwing away a value along with its falsification, for “vir-
tue”—i.e., the struggle against the ego in the life of relation-
ships—has been endorsed by the greatest sages and effectively
pursued as an aspect of the path to the realized condition. Ethical
practice was the preventive psychotherapy of pre-modern times,
and today psychotherapy might be likened to a “lazy man’s way to
virtue”: a way to improve relationships and choices “without
really trying.” Not that there is no effort in it (aside from
monetary cost) but the explicit pursuit now is mostly one of
insight, and it is insight that is offered as a means to decreasing
suffering—while behavioral change is expected to follow sponta-
neously from self-understanding.
Through insight there comes about healing, indeed (and
“virtue” results from a sort of self-digestion of ego in conse-
quence of insight into the destructiveness of our neurotic needs);
I think that the hedonistic bias of psychotherapy has resulted in an
insufficient understanding of self-control as an aspect of health
and the healing process. In spite of its eclectic and integrative
attitude, psychotherapy has failed to integrate its Apollonian and
Dionysian means, values and perspectives.
While the spiritual traditions have emphasized working on
oneself on the process of transformative healing by striving for
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 75

right action and wisdom, in a consumer society that doesn’t trust

the message of old religions, psychotherapy emphasizes what
help may be obtained by paying a guide and a coach, and the
spiritual inertia that is easily encouraged by the “medical model”
is likely to become a trap if there is not a proper understanding of
ego-transcendence as an aspect of the therapeutic task. Volun-
tary-inhibition of egoic manifestations is an implicit aspect of
behavior and cognitive therapy, however, and also of brief and
family systems therapy, and I think that it may be an increasingly
significant item in the therapist’s prescription repertoire.
Summing up: a wise integrative therapy today would be one
which is appreciative of both surrender to the pleasure principle
and the austerity of ego-frustration; for the ego (or karmic
identity) burns in the austerity of self-discipline just as it burns in
the austerity of meditation.

3) Love and non-attachment

Finally, I turn to the affective dimension of meditation and of

the mind, concerning which it is immediately apparent that just as
psycho-pathology involves a loss of awareness and a loss of
spontaneity, it involves a loss in the ability to love.
Love does not only affect the quality of interpersonal rela-
tionships, but also the motivation to work—since work is always
an act of love for self or other—and, since the psychoanalytic
conception of health as genital libido, therapies have mostly
included love in their statement of intent. Freud is often quoted,
indeed, for his definition of psychoanalysis as a means to the
recovery of the ability to love and work. After him, it was specially
Erich Fromm’s view of the productive person that emphasized
the ability to love self and other.
And yet neither the Freudian instinct theory nor the behav-
iorist learning theory are suitable to a discussion of love (except
through some tour de force or another), and “love” is a word that
has been generally avoided in psychological discourse—which in
76 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

its scientific aspiration has tended to stay away from the subjec-
tive and eschew the pre-scientific, preferring to talk about such
things as “positive emotional reinforcement” and “sublimated
erotic impulses.”
Even in the field of practical psychotherapy, where it should
be obvious that the restoration of health implies the recovery of
the person’s ability to love, the issue has been obscured by the
relatively recent concern of therapy with the healing of aggres-
sion. True as it may be that people need to know and accept their
anger before transcending the childish ambivalence that is part of
the neurotic condition, I think that the theory and practice of
psychotherapy would gain from an explicit acknowledgment of
love as an aspect of health and healing inseparable from aware-
ness and spontaneity.
Yet psychotherapy has greatly added to what spiritual tradi-
tions have been able to offer by way of assisting people to become
less hateful. Specialists in the realm of dynamic therapy as well as
their patients are well aware of how love conflicts with resent-
ment and is interfered by vindictiveness, and how these, in turn,
are the residues of early wounds.
Dissolving the defensiveness that was adopted in the face of
early pain can be greatly assisted through insight, and this is not
precisely the approach meant by Buddha in his metaphors of the
arrow and of the fire. (When you are wounded, you don’t ask
who shot the arrow nor why it was shot, he pointed out, but
endeavor to pull it out. When there is fire, too, you don’t waste
time investigating who started it.)
Meditation is like that: it seeks to relinquish karma “here and
now” through a transient neutrality that permits a sort of “dying
to the past.” Therapy, by contrast, steps forward to meet the
haunting past that wants to make itself present in the now, like a
hungry ghost that needs to be taken care of. It takes the position
that something needs to be taken care of, and specializes, so to
say, in the belated digestion of the past—implicitly or explicitly
assuming that something needs to be learned in the process.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 77

“Purification” in the therapeutic process occurs not through

some intentional relinquishment then, but through the inner
digestive juices of psychological understanding.
A therapeutic approach that offers special interest in this
discussion not only because of its orientation to love but through
some strategical contributions (and in view of its powerful thera-
peutic impact) is Hoffman’s Quadrinity Process, to which I have
devoted a chapter in The End of Patriarchy.5
Alice Miller6 has discussed how the forgiveness of parents is
intrinsic to the psychoanalytic cure, and how the process of
understanding one’s life history and the predicament of one’s
parents is, in the best cases, seen as preparatory to compassion
and forgiveness. This seems to arise sometimes by its own accord
when the individual has made enough therapeutic progress, but
not reliably so. In view of this focus on forgiving one’s parents, I
believe Hoffman’s approach constitutes a major contribution to a
person’s recovery of the ability to love.
Love exists in the fundamental categories of self-love, love of
others, and love of the divine (the Highest, Life, Truth, The
Human Prototype, Mother Nature or the transcendent Ground,
etc.). Love of others began with the love of parents; and loving
oneself entails becoming like a mother toward ourselves, con-
cerned with our well being and happiness, and taking pleasure in
our pleasure. To love the divine may or may not be directed to an
anthropomorphic representation of God or an idea of God as
Person. It may be expressed as love of life or of justice. It may be
clothed in a love of art, or it may manifest as a seeking of a higher
truth, or simply in striving for self-improvement.
I suppose most contemporary psychoanalysts regard God a
“transitional object” (like a teddy bear) to the love of others
(tellingly called “object love”!). Be it as it may, I think loving
divine perfection is easier than loving imperfect humans, and I
think the exercising of love in devotion may be to loving people
a transition comparable to what the practice of ego-suspension in
meditation is to ego-less behavior in the world. It seems that love
78 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

needs to be exercised, even if we are too angry at ourselves and

the world to love any particular beings, and the devotional
situation (which is one of loving the source of love), constitutes a
way to exercise love in itself.
If I am correct in this view, it would behoove therapists to
further their client’s devotional expression rather than interpret-
ing it one-sidedly as an escape from the world and fearing it as
potential interference or competition.
Practicing love of the divine cannot of course be separated
from simple concentration on the divine through contemplation
or visualization practices, and also in this case it is enough for
therapists to understand the therapeutic relevance of the issue
and refer their patients to the appropriate specialists and re-
sources.
Though I will be saying more in the chapter specially devoted
to music as meditation, let me just suggest that music is as
important as it is to us mainly because, without our explicit
knowledge, it stimulates in us various nuances of transpersonal
loving. When music listening is turned into a conscious exercise
in love through empathic listening, singing or playing, the result
is likely to be rewarding enough to repeat and perhaps lead to an
enrichment of both music listening and emotional life.
Of course, self-love is one of the expressions of love, and we
may say that when love is present, it shines evenly over self and
other. The idea of liberation of instinct from the strictures of
social conditioning and character has been a generalized feature
of modern therapies since Reich, and we may re-contextualize
such liberation into the framework of a shift from self-rejection
and self-hate to self-acceptance and self-love.
While in the realm of spiritual disciplines the cultivation of
non-attachment has been as prominent as that of devotion, and
austerity as prominent as compassion, again in regard to the
domain of therapy the issue of love has definitely been in the
foreground, while that of non-attachment has been relatively
neglected.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 79

Not only in meditation can the ego burn in tapas (austerity),

however, but there opens up before the person the opportunity of
life itself as a field in which the struggle toward the undoing of the
ego may be pursued. A necessary struggle this is, that requires
austerity to sustain egoic frustration and to inhibit the temptation
of neurotic needs for the sake of re-learning.
Gurdjieff, a master in ego-confrontation, spoke of “The
Work” as “conscious-suffering,” and also Perls—who resembled
Gurdjieff as confrontator and awakener—was keenly aware of
the need to open up to pain as also to find a healthy attitude
before it. How he thought and how he felt about the “niceness”
of professional therapists at the time is echoed in Resnik’s
“chicken soup is poison,” which became a well known Gestalt
slogan.
“To the sick man sweet tastes bitter,” wrote Al Ghazzali, and
this might be translated into saying that for the ego there is
frustration rather than pleasure in those things that are sweet to
the healthy self. To the extent that this is so, a hedonistically
biased approach could not work. True as it is that truth can set us
free of suffering, then, truth does not come without some suffer-
ing. On the way to paradise, there seems to be no alternative to a
time in purgatory if not in hell. In such a journey, non-attachment
is the vehicle of choice, while self-comfort and fearful self-
protectiveness are hindrances.
At a round-table that followed upon Dr. Grof ’s opening
address at the 1982 meeting of the ITA in Bombay, Dr. Frances
Vaughan, then president of the Transpersonal Association asked
me what was my view of a “healthy spiritual development.” I
thought this an all-too-American question that amounted to
asking for a sanitized “death and resurrection in the comfort of
your own home,” and I said something to the effect that the
transpersonal movement has not been exempt of the hedonistic
bias characteristic of humanistic psychology en general, and that
this has reflected in an imbalance between the pursuit of ecstasy
and the willingness to deal with the pain of psycho-dynamic
80 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

inquiry. A spirituality in which there is no sufficient openness to

pain easily becomes an escape from life, with its toil, its discipline,
its lingering wounds of the past, and the frustration of present
imperfections.
The development of consciousness is not a straight ladder to
heaven, as an intellectual might want to depict it; I argued:
growth is cyclic, a pulsating process better represented by a spiral
than by a straight line, in which the way up is at the same time the
way down. And psychotherapy cannot fail to be part of a quest in
which the person needs to be a kind of hero willing to embrace
pain for the sake of the quest’s goal. The vocation to grow (and to
eventually blossom into the fullness of our consciousness and
potential) is inseparable from our nature, and an excessive con-
cern for comfort or attachment to the self-image is not conducive
to the best results.
Because many today—therapists included—are inclined to
see asceticism as the expression of a pathological turning against
the self, it may be well to emphasize both tapas and moral
discipline as universally acknowledged aspects of human devel-
opment, and suggest that much is to be expected of the associa-
tion between behavior modification and an ennea-type informed
cognitivism.
When I started theorizing about meditation, I conceived a
complementarity between love and non-attachment, yet in the
process of developing my ideas in light of the enneagram I have
thought it is more appropriate to use the words “compassion”
and “austerity.” Compassion is the persistence of love in spite of
pain, austerity involves the non-avoidance of pain and non-
pursuit of pleasure in the attempt to transcend desire/aversion.
While I am not undertaking to elaborate further on how
psychotherapy may look from the point of view of non-attach-
ment, I want, least, to say something of how non-attachment
loomed large in the work of the most notable of modern
Dionysians—and also one of the most powerful of therapists:
Fritz Perls.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 81

A person weeping over the reminiscence of some childhood

suffering may scarcely need words to convey an invitation to a
more healthy attitude in face of the painful memory. Perls’ gaze,
like that of Gurdjieff, was of the kind more generally associated to
the figure of Bodhidharma: a gaze at the same time piercing and
non-involved, which to many seemed to convey a “so what” in
face of the childishness of neurotic problems. “So what? Do you
want to hold on to that forever? Do you want to mourn forever
over spilled milk?”
I have frequently talked about the great treasure that was the
transmission of Fritz’s detachment, the ability to not be involved
in the “games people play.” Being a combination of creative
indifference and self-support, I at first called it his “so whatness.”
Since I see growth as inseparable from outgrowing, and do
not think that there can be outgrowing without detachment, I of
course believe that an enrichment of psychotherapy in light of a
conscious consideration of the non-attachment issue would be
desirable, and in the two chapters following this one—“Interper-
sonal Meditation” and “Free Association in a Meditative Con-
text/A Therapeutic and Educational Proposal”—I offer a sample
of my own contribution to the field.

4) The therapeutic relevance of metaphysical insight

To discuss the aspects of meditation mapped by the inner

triangle of the enneagram amounts to discussing that deep medi-
tative realization that cannot be properly called meditation since
it constitutes the unveiling of a pre-existing condition, an under-
lying or buried consciousness. Some may want to call it the truth
of Being, others, the truth of Voidness, or our true identity: the
essence of our consciousness.
It may seem absurd to ask how enlightenment can help
psychotherapy, for it seems that the question should be turned
around. Yet the way in which psychotherapy can help enlighten-
ment is something that I have already been addressing while
82 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

speaking of the restoration of awareness, spontaneity and love,

and something remains to be said as to how an “enlightened
world view” can help along the way.
After explicitly stating that, indeed, our way of seeing things
can influence our progress, I hasten to clarify that I have no
intention of recommending that therapists seek to become teach-
ers of spiritual philosophy; for wisdom is something to be pur-
sued for itself rather than for professional achievement, and it is
enough, I think, that we trust that our understanding will sponta-
neously help others, and that we can orient others to the relevant
books and experts.
Whatever their traditional language, it is the same vision that
is transmitted by all the wisdom traditions. It is well to bear in
mind, however, that what some call the “truth of the self ” and
others “the truth of no-self ” or the “realization of the essence of
mind” constitutes “metaphysical” (cosmologic-anthropologic-
spiritual) insight that not only illuminates meditation but carries
the potential of eclipsing all egoic problems—which are, after all,
(the sapiential traditions agree) the consequences or complica-
tions of spiritual obscuration.
Psychotherapy today doesn’t have anything like a transfor-
mative teaching to offer in its present stage of development, so I
think it behooves contemporary professionals to take into ac-
count the potential of such mental understanding and the avail-
ability of wisdom teachings in the different cultures.7

III. PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE KUNDALINI PROCESS

The conception of “kundalini” that I have proposed—a

heightened mode of operation of organismic function made
possible through the suspension of the ego—amounts to a defini-
tion of health. The full unfolding of the kundalini shakti in the
mythical 72,000 nadis is simply the physical aspect enlighten-
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 83

ment, which intrinsically encompasses mental health. And if the

physical process of transformation that is part of human meta-
morphosis involves a progressive liberation of the subtle sponta-
neity of the body at rest, it must be part of psychotherapy—to the
extent that also therapy aims at the spontaneity of feelings, and,
more generally, of the mind.
If as I have argued, psychotherapy stresses the cultivation of
spontaneity, it is only natural that the condition of heightened
spontaneity that it promotes may be “stepped up,” so to say, to
the “kundalini level.” In other words, it is only natural for
psychotherapy to lead to a kundalini arousal—that point in the
psycho-spiritual transformation process at which the body begins
to undergo that “energetic liberation” that, as we know, seems to
constitute a more or less hidden underside of spiritual growth—
known to entrain in turn additional spiritual and mental phenom-
ena.
In telling about instances in which the pranic component of
kundalini is so apparent, I don’t want to narrow the subject to
instances in which automatic movement or pranic phenomena
come to the foreground, for perhaps the way in which psycho-
therapy, in the process of liberating the person from his ego,
becomes an entry into the serpentine domain, may take a form in
which other aspects of the kundalini phenomenon are more
apparent—such as the mediumistic or the visionary. Mostly, I
want to draw attention to the fact that successful psychotherapy
of one kind or another may come to a point where, as in spiritual
life, the sufficiently purified individual is reborn to another level
of life where the “Great Goddess” Herself becomes the healer and
guide.
In the world of specific therapies there is one that I find
particularly conducive to a kundalini arousal, and it has not
emerged from the sphere of insight therapy but from a therapeu-
tic application of dance: “authentic movement,” created by Mary
Whitehouse and taught today particularly by Janet Adler. It might
84 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

be described as a Latihan minus its explicitly religious context,

and Janet Adler’s book8 could well be described as the story of a
segment in her own kundalini ripening.
I have already mentioned how Gestalt therapy was the con-
text of my own kundalini awakening, and can now add that, as a
psychotherapist using Gestalt, I too have been a witness to
kundalini arousals.
In the pages that follow I transcribe a complete case recorded
in Esalen in 1968/9, when, pioneering as I may have been, I was
also a beginner. It is not the only time when I have seen psycho-
logical work trigger a top/bottom opening of the prana-stream.
However short the session may have fallen of bringing about
complete liberation of the patient’s body or emotional life, it is
clear that the sense of fluid orbiting his body along with fire in his
belly were triggered in him in the process of re-owning the
content of his dream.

Franz: I had a dream and I tried to figure it out myself but I don’t
know if I really did. It was a very disturbing dream. I have a little
five-year-old girl that I love with such an intensity that it’s sort of a
... we’re sort of one person. And I call her “Sweetie-pie.” And, ah,
and I had a dream in which ah, she was hanging up on a rope from
a beam similar to these beams. And her, she was still alive, though,
but she, her head was kind of crooked, like this. And she was looking
at me like ah, “Well Daddy I don’t like this but if you really want to
do it, that’s OK.” And ah, ... there was a butcher knife and I took the
back end of it—the back side—and I took it and I pushed it through
and decapitated her. And then I woke up and was just hideously in
very much pain. You know. I just ached all over. And that was the
end of the dream.

Naranjo: Could you imagine yourself in the position of your

daughter just as you saw her in the dream and share with us how it
feels to be her in that position? Give words to what she did not say
in the dream but she might be feeling.
F: Well, from the expression on her face it sort of looked like she
was just this (shows) and saying, you know, “You know, Daddy, I
don’t really like this, but ...”
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 85

N: Now you are her. Develop that.

F: Okay, Daddy, I don’t really like this, but ah, I’ll go along with you
if that’s what you want. ... It’s sort of like she is very much afraid, you
know, but she is being very brave. “I’m very much afraid, but I’m
being very brave because I like you a lot too, and I’ll do whatever
you want.”
N: Now continue this dialogue. In the dream it was one sided, but
now go on dreaming, so to say, and respond to her. She’s just told
you that you really want this and ...

F: I’m myself now. (20 sec. pause)

N: What do you feel right now?
F: Very confused.

N: See if you can get in touch with the feeling by describing it.
F: (Long pause. Stands with eyes closed and lowered head. Starts
using left arm forward.) There’s just something in my arm. My arm
feels like a lever. The confusion is going away now. It’s just like a
mechanical lever. ... It’s like there’s some hidden force there that I’m
not aware of what it is.
N: Maybe you can tell her this now, that you cannot help doing what
you are doing; that your arm is like a lever and so forth.

F: Sweetie-pie, my arm is like a lever and it’s really going by itself. I,

I don’t really have control over it.
N: What was the feeling then?
F: It’s like there’s something just driving straight out and, and it
wants to keep going and I have to kind of break it and ... (tension in
voice in last sentence.)

N: Stay with it. Develop this feeling, or maybe express this, in

movement or words or something.
F: There’s something out there pulling me. It’s, there’s, (struggling)
there’s something out there. There’s on my hand, too ... (struggling)
Oohh! (acting out) I feel something pulling it. (Pulls again for about
10 sec. of verbal struggling.)
N: Any other image aside from the rope?
86 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

F: Well, there’s something else but it’s so vague I don’t know what
it is. It’s like the rope goes off into, into kind of a gray and white
cloud or something which just disappears.
N: That sounds familiar, from what you have been saying during the
week; your gray man ...9 OK, even though it’s vague, imagine you
are this thing pulling you — the rope or whatever is behind the rope
pulling. Try to merge with that, Franz, and you are pulling Franz,
and having him perform that action.
F: (pause) That really throws me because ... I’m having him perform.

N: You’re having what?

F: That, that throws me. I’m, I, I can’t get in tune with that right
now—that I’m the one who is controlling Franz. You know; I’m
having him performing; like I got him over there and I’m pulling
him...
N: How does it feel to have him perform what you want?

F: But I don’t want him to do that. I don’t want him to perform that
way and, and I don’t want to pull him either. It’s ah, the fact is that
I’m just pulling and the rope’s slipping through his hands. Yeah.
That, it really isn’t working. ... My, my hands feel like clubs. They
don’t feel like hands anymore. They feel like clubs with knots on the
ends. I, I don’t even feel the rope anymore...
N: Now let your hands speak. Imagine your hands can say what they
feel.
F: These hands are solid. They ah, they’re like a rock on the end of
a stick and they’re, they’re very hard. And ah, and there’s some kind
of a life inside, though; there’s something moving inside the rocks
as, it’s like a, a worm or something inside crawling around.

N: Let that life inside speak. You are now that life crawling around
inside the rock.
F: (silence) There’s, there’s some kind of a, there’s a pump. There’s
a pump pumping something. It’s, it’s a surge; some kind of surge.
N: “I am a pump.”

F: Pump. It, it just goes around and around like this, and it’s a, a
pump that surges around and around inside the rock like this.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 87

(Indicates a circular movement in his body, up his back and down his
front.)
N: Then feel that pump surging. Continue to identify with it ... What
does it want?
F: I’ve got a pipe coming in my head. You know? There is a pipe
coming in the top of me and one going out the bottom, and I’m
circulating something. And I ache all over. This pump is, it’s got a lot
of strain, too. There’s a lot of parts in it that are about to break.
There’s ah, it’s like ah, a little more pressure and the pump will
break apart. Much pressure in the pump.

N: Continue speaking as pump. “More pressure and I will break

apart.” Be one with the pump.
F: I, I have parts sort of like sides. There’s much pressure in me and
I feel that if the pressure gets any greater these sides will break.
N: Repeat this a few more times but feeling that Franz is saying this.

F: I’m Franz and, and I have a lot of things going th-through from my
head through my bottom. Sort of like there’s something from my
head to my bottom. It’s sort of like there’s something coming out of
my rectum. Pumps in my head and goes out my rectum. And I feel
like if I get any more pressure I’m gonna break.
N: Keep repeating this last statement.
F: And I feel like if I get any more pressure in me I’m gonna break....
And I feel like if I get any more pressure in me I’m gonna break....
My rip cage feels like it’s gonna break. It’s (breathing laboriously) if
I (rasping) get any more pressure in me I’m gonna break.

N: Could you imagine yourself saying this to your daughter? Try

and see what meaning the statement takes on.
F: Ohh. Oh Sweetie-pie. If I get any more pressure in me I’m gonna
break. Oh, things are breaking. There’s something breaking inside
of me. There’s there’s something breaking.
N: Tell her more about that.

F: (still rather rasping, tired and strained) It feels like my backbone

is splitting down the middle and there’s something inside of me
that’s green and sort of squiggly. Oh, oh, my backbone!
88 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

N: Go with it and let yourself break.

F: Oohh. And my head’s breaking, too. (strained) The pressure’s in
my head ... my backbone ... I’m afraid to let go. Oh, my back hurts.
N: Could you let go some more?

F: Ohhh. (sighs and struggles) ... Ohhh, Oh, my stomach hurts now.
Ohh, and my head hurts.
N: Let go as much as you can and let what wants out, even if you feel
that you can break some more.
F: Oh yeah, (still struggling physically and vocally) my hip wants to
break. Ohh. Oh, my foot wants to break. Oh, ohh. Ohhhh ... ohhh...
ohh. I wann let it break but it won’t break. There’s something
holding it. There’s something keeping it from breaking. There’s like
a sack around my feet, like a board or like a leather boot ... Ohhhh!
Oh ohhh.

N: Is the pressure greater now?

F: Oh, it’s breaking my back again! Oh and my arms are frozen.
Ohhhh. Ohhhh.
N: Do you still feel that green thing inside?

F: (whispers at first) It’s just a, a little green cloud now.

N: Just put your attention there for a while.
F: (very softly) I’m scared. I’m frozen. I can’t move. My back hurts
and my arms are frozen. My head hurts. That, that iron band is
around my head again. There’s an iron band around my head.

N: OK, see if you can now stretch and become that iron band. Be
that which is paralyzing you. Feel yourself now as metal constrain-
ing you and making you hurt.
F: I’m just starting to pump again. I’m throbbing all over. (All this
still almost inaudible) My fingers are throbbing again. My pump is
back in me again. I’m off again. I’m pumping. I think the iron band
is a pump. It’s pumping things through my head.
N: It seems you feel more comfortable being the iron band around
you and squeezing Franz than being the victim of the squeezing.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 89

F: Yeah. A little more. My, my back quit hurting. Only my hands are,
my hands are just pumping or throbbing. They just throb. They’re
pulsing.
N: OK, see if you could now have a dialogue between these two
sides of you; Franz the paralyzed, frozen one, and the pump or the
metal band, as you wish. See what they have to say to each other.
You might start with Franz paralyzed and talking to this band.
F: I’m, I’m stiff and I can’t move. But, but you’re pumping things
through me and I pulsate. My whole body’s pulsating. It’s like a, like
ah, everything’s pulsating ... Ooh. Even my eyes are pulsating.

N: Do you have any feelings towards this thing pumping through

you, this metal part?
F: (Still softly and tired or rasping) It feels like a, like a robot with all
kinds of lights going on and off. Sort of like a neon sign, just
pulsating.
N: Are you the robot with the lights?

F: I feel like a robot with neon lights inside me, and these lights are
all going on and off.
N: OK, let’s look more into this theme. This is coming up since the
very first scene: you perform an action in your dream in which you
feel like your hand does something that you don’t want to do, like
a lever or something pulls you, something does something through
you. You are pumped, now. You seem to experience yourself
always, not as the agent of movement, but as something moved. So
let us take this statement “I feel like a robot.” I would like you to
come back again to us, to the group, and do some repeating of this
statement to other people. Tell some of us here “I feel like a robot,”
and watch your feelings as you say this. Or maybe start just where
you are by saying it to nobody or to everybody. Stick to that
statement “I feel like a robot,” and see what feeling emerges; how
relevant it is.
F: I feel like a robot ... (is still mumbling almost inaudible) ... with
much activity inside ... I feel like a, like a robot. (Semi-closed eyes,
as if listening intently to himself) There’s a great deal of activity
inside ... I feel like a robot ... and I don’t like to feel like a robot ...
90 THE WAY OF SILENCE AND THE TALKING CURE

I’d rather move around. Don’t like to be stiff. (Seems to move

around during pause) I don’t like to feel like a robot. (Sighs) I’d
rather move around and I’d rather be flexible. (Still seems to be
moving) Hmmm. That pump is really going inside; making me
dizzy.
N: Could you let this pumping do something with your movements.
Could you let tha...
F: Please?

N: Could let that pumping do something—guide you—let the

pumping move you around instead of being contained in you.
F: I guess most of the parts are in my head. The iron band is gone.
It’s not there any more. It isn’t there any more. It’s (moving and sort
of whispering so pretty inaudible) I feel so uncoordinated. It’s just a,
it’s hot, too. It’s real hot, too. It just goes through me like this, and
I feel like I’m going to fall over.
N: Just let the pumping continue and ...

F: It just goes around and around.

N: ... more and more.
F: It goes like this; round and round through me here. Through me
like this. (Shows) (whispering) Then my stomach gets on fire. My
stomach is hot, too. (Sighs) ...

N: Is it increasing?
F: (Struggling) Oh yes. Oh. Oh.
N: Then go all the way.

F: (Whispers) Oh this fire is big. Oh it’s, oh. Oh.

N: See if you can go on doing the same thing, letting the movement
go on within, but stamp your feet a little while you do that. Keep
moving.
F: (Very quietly) My stomach feels so heavy, like this. Pieces of lead
in it or something that’s heavy. And now that iron back is — the iron
band is back on my head again.
 The Interface Between Meditation and Psychotherapy 91

N: Do you have any feeling of what the energy wants; where it wants
to go?
F: The, the iron band seems to want to keep my brain from
exploding. It, it’s holding it.
N: Let it explode. I think you’re safe.

F: The iron band’s holding in tighter. Now it’s coming. My whole

face is becoming an iron mask. I’m scared.
N: Take sides with the energy. Imagine the energy can talk to the
iron band. See if you can feel what the energy would like to say to the
iron band.
F: Iron band, I don’t like you holding me in like this. You’re, you’re
constricting me ...

N: Put the strength of that energy in your voice when you say it.
F: I see a lot of purple lights. There are purple lights flashing all over
the place ... purple lights ... lights ...
N: Try to merge more with the energy, just as if you were inside the
(inaudible) ...

F: ... My body isn’t right now. My arms won’t go any more.

N: OK, let’s see if we can serve as iron band for you. How would you
feel if we hold you in so you try to literally break through us. My
feeling would be to make a small circle around you so you can use all
this energy in fighting us. We will be your iron band. (more around)
Use all the energy that you can to break.
F: (Struggles and screams for around 20 sec., then calms down and
repeats “Oh,” many times, panting, occasionally intermingled with
“Oh my God.” This must go on for about a minute with more “Oh
my God” at the end.) Oh, I am pumping now. (Chuckles from
group) Ohh. Holy God. (Still panting) I didn’t think he (or you)
meant that much. Oh my God. Oh shit.