Awakening and Insight Quotes

“Because Buddhism presents a spiritual argument for the transformation (not the medication) of suffering, as well as specific and systematic methods of analyzing subjective distress, it now assists me in being able to address audiences about the principles and uses of analytic psychotherapy.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“[T]he formless self is free from all suffering even as it compassionately ‘takes on’ the suffering of all.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“At a first glance, medical psychology seems to have nothing to do with religion. But at its depth it provides a new, though at the same time primordial, perspective on what should be the subject matter of religion. It is both a criticism and an approval of religion. It is in and through the soul that problems of the world reveal themselves as world problems.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Scientism proposes that scientific investigation is nothing more than the accumulation of ‘facts’. The question thus arises: what actually are ‘facts’? They are not simply existing there, waiting for scientific investigation. Only a little phenomenological reflection reveals that they show themselves as facts because of the construction of, or at least the correlation with, what is usually called mind.
Mind thus is a fundamental fact. It is psychology that reveals this truth.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Truly being oneself is being oneself without an I center. [...] The person is there, but is no longer person-oriented anymore.
(Christa W. Anbeek and Peter A. de Groot)”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“One of the problems of the contemporary era is that there is no longer any religious meaning system that is commonly accepted. More than ever, people have to find their own way in dealing with the fundamental questions of life and death. On the one hand, this is an inspiring situation which opens up new possibilities [...]. On the other hand, in many cases it is too immense a task for an individual to perform. People are dependent upon others in giving meaning to their lives. We do not create meaning by ourselves but commit ourselves to a meaning system which is presented by a surrounding community or a tradition.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“For students coming to meditation practice with faulty ego functioning, the enlightenment ideal may mistakenly represent ‘a purified state of complete and invulnerable self-sufficiency from which all badness has been expelled, the aim of all narcissistic strivings”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“When a wide variety of mental processes are treated with bare, non-judgmental attention, they are held in an open, spacious container. This enables the meditation practitioner to befriend his or her thoughts and emotions, no matter what they are, and reduces the likelihood of being tyrannized by an inordinately demanding superego”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The goal in meditation is not to exorcise the psyche of disturbing thoughts and emotions, nor to suppress them, but to hold them in non-reactive, friendly awareness. They may not necessarily disappear from the practitioner’s psyche, but through consistent observing and witnessing of them, they cease to trouble him or her.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Suffering from feelings of inner emptiness, some meditation practitioners may misunderstand and likewise be attracted to the Buddhist notion of ‘no-self,’ and mistakenly seek doctrinal validation for their feelings of emptiness.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Dogen maintains that self and other are ultimately interdependent; the self does not exist prior to, or outside of, the other; we only have the possibility of experiencing self or other through relationship.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Much of our reasoning about human life and other beings on this planet now rests on the theory of natural selection. Most educated people believe (at least vaguely) in the scientific principle that the living organisms on earth have evolved over billions of years from other organisms that were unlike them, and are now mostly extinct. When this story is told of humanity, it wholly eliminates the role of personal meaning and human intentions in the development of societies and the lives of individuals. The ‘master molecule’ of the gene, falsely endowed with an autonomous power, is most often used to explain personal desires, intentions, and actions. The term ‘gene’ or ‘adaptation’ has replaced intention, purpose, and meaning in most psychological accounts of the ways in which people thrive or fail to thrive in their everyday lives. All of our struggles—such as finding a mate or becoming a compassionate person—can now be recast in terms of their supposed ‘advantages’ of leaving the greatest number of offspring.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“The growing dependency of culture on scientific knowledge has not suppressed the counter-movement of a pervasive disillusionment with mechanistic explanations of the totality of the cosmos and human life within it. Of itself the critique of science does not, however, signal a revival of religion. On the contrary, to the extent that today’s esoterica and search for new forms of spiritual experience confine themselves to the shadows of science, they promote a greater alienation of religion from the everyday world and strengthen the ‘normal,’ scientific-technological way of valuing the things of life.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“We are still a long way from having sorted out wild conjecture from reasonable hypothesis in the maelstrom of ideas. Meantime, it has become irrevocably clear that there are whole blocks of experience that do not fit received patterns and may require new paradigms of mind.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Today the mind has taken a turn towards an organic interconnectedness among all things in the apparent attempt to restore something in self-awareness that had been lost in classical scientific method and religious orthodoxy.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“We are still too much a part of the story of what is happening to religious consciousness to assess its meaning.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“In our normal, everyday forms of consciousness, we suffer form what [William] James calls a 'lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self.' Insofar as the self that encases the seed of a wider consciousness like a husk is seen as 'conventionally healthy,' cracking it open to uncover the higher part leaves the individual exposed to neurosis; but then, as James reminds us and as Jung himself knew, this may well be the chief condition for receptivity to these higher realms.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“[S]urely the mysterious inner world of the psyche as such still offers an important forum where religions can meet, leaving their dogmas at the door, and pursue together the elusive quest for a common humanity that transcends religious differences.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Awareness of the existence of oneself leads to a crisis in which one’s being-in-the-world is fundamentally questioned. One’s existence, however, is not simply denied. Instead, one faces the basic fact that one is responsible for one’s relations to all humans and other beings through one’s acts.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“[W]hat would be more reliable than the East and the West? Perhaps a concept of the world, the universe, or the cosmos. Our age can be characterized by the growing consciousness of the world as a whole. Our historical era is in essence cosmological.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“[T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Asian philosophy and culture never endured an intellectual upheaval like the Cartesian split of mind and body that brought the so-called Enlightenment to the West. The consequent achievements of scientific method and the less fortunate by-products of secular self-interest together laid the groundwork, in Europe and America, for the personal psychology of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy