form wrote: ↑Tue Aug 10, 2021 1:15 pm
I knew many things about five aggregates which I will not explain here because I do not think anyone will appreciate or understand. I suspect I will get many sutta quotations in reply and then then ended with some debates on pali words interpretation.
The interlink between modern psychology with Buddhism will be the unconscious theory together with conditioning as well as the essentials of effective communication. These three areas have lots of things in common for both subjects.
Suffering and the ways out of suffering is about an answer to a philosophical question. This too is a common subject in psychology.
The thing about Buddhism is about reality. Face the reality. It is not about romantic fantasies from reading the nikaya but about facing your own psyche to free yourself. The things repressed in the mind, face them and let go of them.
Thank you for your input
. It triggers few thoughts:
1- The theory of the unconscious seems to be linked to the ambiguity of existence, where things can hold more than one meaning, and where the truer meaning is evasive and subject to endless debate. This is where effective communication and contextualizing become necessary. I am not sure about conditioning though as it tries to explain away ambiguity instead of acknowledging it.
2- It is not a coincidence that in most universities, philosophy and psychology belong to the same faculty and are suitable to be taken as double major. The link between the two stems from the common perception that there are deeper levels of reality that are to be explored or discovered. In the context of psychology, the deeper levels are of the psyche or the mind, while in philosophy, it is the love of wisdom and the notion of "things as they really are". Both seem to aim to transcend the limits of the lay user: For example, you can use knowledge to manage your activities, or you can use a watch to tell you the time, or you can use the concept of existence to convey and construct meaning, but to ask what is knowledge, time or existence is to be landed with genuine philosophical questions.
3- What it means to facing the reality is not less ambiguous, which is linked to the notions of fear and heroism: which would be more courageous? to accept the world as you came to know it or to seek changing it? what would be more heroic, to acknowledge your fear of death as useful, or to try to eliminate it? Is finding faults in the world is a product of our wisdom, or of our deepest fears and inability to accept the world as it is?
The relationship between heroism and the fear of death is equally interesting and relevant to Buddhist practices such as the contemplation of death and the bodhisattva idea in Mahayana Buddhism. Possible parallels between the two can be found in Ernest Becker's work on the denial of death.
And the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus, saying: "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"
This was the last word of the Tathagata.