What is the relevance of the Ashram today?

The Ashrams want us to take shelter in them!! I am a rogue godman. LOL.

Terminology and an effort at interrogating the psychoanalytical significance of the closed space of an “ashram”. 

The term ‘ashram’ has its roots in the Devnagri term ‘ashray’ or shelter. Traditionally it has symbolised a protected place where one could find shelter from the vicissitudes of the world. Conversely, it has also come to mean in the contemporary Indian secular mindset, an escape from the rigours of everyday life. And within the pre-Vedic cultures, the right to permanently live in an Ashram was confined to those whose chosen path was Brahma -vidya, that is those who sought the knowledge of the Self or Atman. Later on, due to social decadence and subsequent ossification of work-roles, the Ashram life became a prerogative for Brahmins where the latter chose to carry out elaborate Vedic rituals prioritising them over the erstwhile seeking of the Ultimate Truth. It is within this context of social ossification and Brahmin prerogatives that Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita exhorts Arjuna to fight on for by the time the Mahabharata came into being, Ashram as a geographical place of solace and true quest had deteriorated into a fiefdom of a handful of hereditary Brahmins under royal patronage. So during the time of the composition of the Bhagavad Gita itself we find that the shift in the understanding of an ashram occurs. It is no longer a geographical terrain but the ethical mores constructed within one’s heart. The boundaries of the Ashram become the boundaries of moral, religious and spiritual ethics. This concept of the ashram throws up interesting observations for us today: the Ashram in psychoanalytic terms starts to be a sort of the Super-ego of Freud, acting as an internal censor against unrighteousness. The mythical attacks of monsters and demons on Ashramites becomes attacks of the unconscious Id against the claims of the super-ego. So, like everything else in our Post-Modern world, the Ashram too is a sign which can be sine die  interpreted using various hermeneutic tools.

 

My concept of an ashram. I am getting incorrigible day by day.

The Catholic appropriation of the Indian Hindu concept of the Ashram and ensuing controversies.

“Over the past … decades, the Catholic Church in India has made more overt efforts to relate the Christian faith to the pluralistic Indian religious landscape. One of the tangible signs of this trend is the renewed interest in the Catholic ashrams that have been a fertile ground for various experiments in adaptation known as “inculturation.” Sociologist Helen Ralston describes this new interest in ashrams within Indian Catholicism as the product of a new religious consciousness inspired by Vatican II and galvanized by the 1969 All India Seminar on the Church in India Today, which “called upon all.. . to promote ashrams and an ashram way of life.” The Ashram-Aikya, an association of nearly 100 influential Indian Catholic theologians committed to ashnunic ideals and lifestyle, has made a sustained theological argument that ashram life and spirituality are the most authentic signs of an inculturated Indian Christianity.” ^[1]

                                               The Catholic Church in India appropriated the concept of the Ashram for her own ends. This has elicited strong reactions from right-wing Hindu fundamentalists. The Church. post Vatican Council II, wanted to enter into dialogues with other religions and termed this movement asinculturation^[2]. According to the Church, different regional differences in the world demanded different yet adaptive religious practices. So we had in India an active effort by Benedictine monks from Europe who wanted to adapt their choir practices into Indian plainchant in the lines of the Vedic chants.They even donned saffron clothes and integrated Yogic practices within their daily schedule. It is to their initial work that we have quite a few Catholic Ashrams in India today. But this mode of life has come under scrutiny from both conservative Catholics and Hindus. The latter see this mode of living as bordering on heresy and the dilution of their Faiths. In fact, quite a number of times, the Church hierarchy here in India as well as that in Europe has hauled up members of Catholic Ashrams for deviating from orthodox doctrine. Liturgical practices in many of these Ashrams have also drawn the attention of the Roman curia for the preservation of the Doctrine of the Faith. Hindu fundamentalists have repeatedly pointed out that these Ashrams are ways to confuse ordinary Hindus in believing that saffron wearing Catholics were in fact Hindu sadhus and what in fact the Church considers as inculturation was in truth an intrusion into Hindu culture in the guise of the Ashram movement. While these are ground-realities and are to be debated by sociologists and Catholic liturgists, the scope of this essay does not permit further elucidation of these controversies^[3].

An ashram is a monad which helps you to look into yourself even out in the world.

The Relevance of the Ashram today and seeing the Ashram as a Post-modern Signifier.

So, we return to the possible significances of the Ashram today: does it have any role to play in contemporary life? The answer in a nutshell, is yes,  without any ambiguity. The lived-experience of life in an Ashram where eternity meets temporality, where the cacophony of the world is silenced definitely provides at least a psychological space for the harried individual. In today’s context, the Ashram should be viewed as a safe-haven where a lay person of any Faith can find solace from the humdrum of the world. Sri Ramakrishna exhorted his young monastic disciples to form ashrams where lay devotees can come to experience God within their hectic, worldly lives. It is another matter that today most ashrams are just part of money-making scams, dens of vices and are not thought of highly by the majority of Indians. The Ashrams often tend to function as all-engulfing cults.^[4] This too needs concentrated attention by religious leaders and sociologists but for the sake of this essay, we can only highlight the symbolic and ideal values of an Ashram.

 

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[1]See the excellent essay by Selva J. Raj, “Adapting Hindu Imagery: A Critical Look at Ritual Experiments in an Indian Catholic Ashram,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies (2000).

[2]See Michael Amaladoss, “In Our Own Tongues: Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation,” Theological Studies 66.3 (2005): 719.

[3] See ”I Went in Search of Utopia.And Got Center Parcs; It Was Set Up in India in the Sixties as an ‘Experiment in Human Unity’ with No Money, No Religion and No Rules. but at Auroville There Are Meetings Lots of Them, and Tamils Who Do All the Work .Don’t Mention the Servants,” The Mail on Sunday (London, England), 18 March 2007, 60.

“A forthright German woman in her 50s asked me: ‘What do you call it when everyone has to adhere to a single idea? Fascism!’ Yet Auroville is endorsed byUnesco and the Indian government and gets special privileges such as tax exemption. Surely there is something admirable about trying to live differently, however tiresome it may be, and their ecological achievements are incredible.

But I have never been anywhere that felt less spiritual, whatever that means. India is my favourite place and this wasn’t India.”

 

[4]Stork, Jane. Breaking the Spell: My Life as a Rajneeshee, and the Long Journey Back to Freedom. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2010. This is a disturbing book and similar works abound on the ISKON. Naturally the ordinary Indian is suspicious about ashrams today.

 

Basic Skills and Techniques in Counselling Psychology

Oops!

“ Many helpers never meet anyone whom they would classify as seriously disturbed or in need of a different and more specialized kind of treatment…Persons in this category…do not fit into textbook pigeonholes. They do not have hallucinations, nor do they suppose themselves to be great historical figures.They have the garden variety of human problems and they need to be understood accordingly. These are the people who come to talk to old friends, their clergy, former teachers…in their quest for a better grasp of themselves. The fact that they are not classically diagnosable does not mean that they do not need a sensitive effort at understanding from us.” ^[1] 

Counselling as a Process.

Counselling as a process is involved with the balancing of the binaries of the counsellor and the client who seeks help in severe cases, as the above quotation proves. For most people, this does not apply. The process is mediated by various psychological models, approaches and the needs of the client interpreted through the theoretical lens of the counsellor. Depending on the orientation of the counsellor, the process of counselling will involve various aspects. For example, a Freudian counsellor may seem to be more aggressive and intrusive than a Rogerian counsellor. But the first and foremost aspect of counselling is establishing an atmosphere of cooperation, empathy and trust between the counsellor and the client. This is of great importance, no matter to which school the counsellor subscribes to. This is the first step in the praxis of counselling: this establishment of a bond of mutual trust and acceptance. With this goes an empathic non-judgemental reception of the client’s problems. This last, leads us to the second step in counselling as a process.

The counsellor, after having made the client posturally comfortable within the counselling room, will now proceed to understand the client. This involves a non-interfering, objective creation of a case-history of the client. The formulation of the ‘case-history’ is crucial in determining the later stages of the client’s therapy. After this is done, the counsellor will have to determine the course of therapeutic action that s/he needs to take regarding the client. Again, the academic orientation of the counsellor will come into play here. S/he might subscribe to a particular school of psychological thought and treat the client accordingly. If the counsellor is of the school of Freud, then following recent developments in her field, she may take an intrusive stance while dealing with the client. For example, the counsellor may ask firm question regarding the client’s childhood and try to understand what went awry during the infancy to pin down and explain present troubles of the client. Thus a neo-Freudian counsellor will insist that the client be more forthcoming about her past than say a Humanist counsellor would be. The later would encourage more proactive and Socratic methods during the counselling process and herself would try to take a backseat, allowing the client to deal with the present without over-emphasising the past. This is the classical Rogerian mode of counselling. Today, counsellors generally try to integrate various aspects from different psychologists to help their patients better. So, as we have seen the next process of counselling is to take a case-history of the client and formulate a plan for further treatment of the client. This, in turn leads us to the next step of therapy: encouraging the client to continue with therapy.

 

Counselling as a Process mediated by SSRI and anti-psychotic drugs.

Pop a pill to stay afloat. Joking buddy.

Here, this author feels, that apart from the socio-economic stigma and burden on the client which are preventing factors for her to continue with therapy, is the crucial understanding required of the counsellor that contemporary counselling should and must work in tandem with neuro-psychiatrists. Meta-analyses of large groups of depressed individuals have shown that therapies like Cognitive Behavior Therapy do not have the desired effect if they are started before anti-depressant therapies with Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors. Only after adequate time-lapse of administering these drugs and restoring serotonin imbalances does Cognitive Behaviour Therapy work. It has also been proven that the outcomes of patients receiving talk therapy alone versus placebo have a poor prognosis; those receiving drugs alone have a much better prognosis as against placebo; and those receiving drug therapy followed by drug therapy and CBT have the best prognosis both against placebo as well as the previous two groups. Thus, while most counselling text books do not emphasize the need for drugs in the the counselling process, this author feels that drug therapy should be part of the standard protocol for counsellors within the very matrix of counselling. Contrary to popular belief, most of our populations are under-medicated and newer SSRIs are neither sedating nor do their side-effects outweigh their usefulness. So, as this author sees it, there is a need for the neuro-psychiatrist’s help within the counselling process. Medical science has proven that Freud et al, including Klein and Piaget may after all have been grossly wrong in seeing the mind as anything but chemically and genetically driven. After ensuring that the client is under, if necessary, mild drug regimens, there should be an effort on the part of the counsellor to ensure that the counselling process is not interrupted.             

 

Counselling as a lifelong process.

These are in short, the various aspects involved in counselling. This author believes that while theoretically counselling-session frequencies may reduce; yet it is in practicality a lifelong process e.g. those who suffer from severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorders may require lifelong medical and counselling interventions. So there is in reality, no sense of an ending within the counselling process.

To sum up in point form the various stages in counselling:

1. The counsellor should put at ease the client.For example,
   

   The cartoon says it all

   Freudian counsellors tend to sit back away from the reclining client. Rogerian counsellors on the other hand allow the client to sit facing them one on one and make eye-contact.

2. The counsellor and the client will perforce pass through a process of transferance and counter-transferance. If not for sometime, at least for a fleeting moment the binary of the counsellor/client is reversed and the latter gets prioritized in this duality.
3. Today’s counsellors should be able to screen and rule out mental illnesses in the client. If mental illnesses are encountered then the counsellor must be able to refer the client to an able neuro-psychiatrist.
4. The counsellor should have sufficient scientific knowledge to encourage the client to take help of medications and then carry on with any form of talk-therapy.

It will be worthwhile to reflect here on the very mythos that the counselling profession is heir to:

The field of counselling surely has its share of unconvincing theories, terminological obstacles, unnecessary rituals and institutionalised opinions masquerading as knowledge. I believe the essence of counselling to be, like certain religious and philosophical endeavours, intimately related to truth seeking and salvation seeking. Like religion, counselling and psychotherapy probably generate as many problems as they solve, and they certainly create a great deal of myth and superstition. If we directly compare the clergy with thecounselling profession, I would say that the existence of sanctioned priests creates the false impression and belief that they are closer to God than others. Likewise, the counselling profession creates an illusion that sanctioned counsellors know more about human nature and are necessarily more skillful listeners and helpers than others. Certainly it is a commonly drawn conclusion that people who spend many years in psychoanalysis and analytic training must in some way be closer to profound human truths, and/or possess far greater self-knowledge, than others.^{[2] (blarney!)}

 

It is keeping the above paragraph in mind that we may venture to assess the various stages of counselling as falsely constructed fluid demarcations in what should constitute a harmonious process where the client in fact is hardly ever aware that s/he is undergoing any counselling at all.

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[1]Kennedy, E. On Becoming a Counsellor. [S.l.]: Gill & Macmillan, 1977, p. 96.

[2] See Colin Feltham, “Chapter 22 Beyond Denial, Myth and Superstition in the Counselling Profession,” in New Directions in Counselling ed. Rowan Bayne, Ian Horton, and Jenny Bimrose (New York: Routledge, 1996), 297.

 

Guru Sishya Relationship in the Indian Tradition.

Without a Guru there is no spiritual progress

“Why do you need a master?” asked a visitor of one of the disciples.

“If water must be heated it needs a vessel as an intermediary between the fire and itself,”was the answer.

(De Mello, Anthony. One Minute Wisdom. Anand, Gujarat: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 2009, p.46.)

Some initial observations and critique of the Guru/shishya relationship within Indian traditions. 

The seers say that the Master/Guru arrives when the disciple is ready. According to one of the more popular hymns of Hinduism, the devotee equates her/his guru as equivalent to Brahma (the Creator aspect of the Godhead),

Varaha Avatara

Vishnu (the Sustaining aspect of the Godhead) and

Maheswara

Maheswara (the Destructive aspect of the Godhead)^[1]. We read in the multi-volume life of

Paramhamsa Sri Sri Ramakrishna & His Disciple Swami Vivekananda

Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa (1836-1886) that he stressed the fact that it was only the Guru who can in a moment cleanse the soul of the seeker/sinner/devotee. In fact, the Desert Fathers maintained that only a fool depends on himself for spiritual guidance: a spiritual mother/father was an absolute necessity if one were to progress in the spiritual life (see the Penguin edition of Benedicta Ward’s masterful translation of the sayings of the Desert Fathers)^[2]. In the Sufi tradition of Islam we have the various silsilas which have at their helms either a woman or enlightened man guiding the group. In the Buddhist and Jaina traditions too we find either a lama or an acharya/muni guiding the seekers after jnana. I refer to all these religious traditions to bring home the point that India has a long tradition of pluralism and yet all these various schools of thought/religions all ultimately rely on a very human Master/Guru to communicate to the seeker the Ultimate Reality about the Godhead. Within Hindu paradigms the Guru was someone who initiated the Brahmin seeker into the path of Brahman ( the Godhead) and in spiritual terms gave new life to the seeker. After this initiation, the seeker was known as a dvija, a ‘twice-born’. Henceforth the Hindu seeker, who traditionally received this initiation very young from a much older Guru had to serve in the Guru’s household till the completion of his studies. This was done a long time ago and is no longer practised in lived-Hinduism. The reality is that the caste-system has ossified and now there are traditional Brahmins who hardly care for gurus or their injunctions. Truth is, the average Hindu Indian today sees god-men as Gurus are now called in jest after being caught peddling God for money, sex and power. These corruptions are shared by all religious leaders in our country. So this author sees hardly any merit in the guru-shishya relationship today. Anthony de Mello sj, the witty Jesuit seer, once said a Guru is one who teaches the disciple to get rid of the Guru. It is recounted of one of the Desert Fathers that when another younger aspirant to the life-ascetical asked him of what traits a person should possess to become a Master; the former lifted up his right hand in blessing and his five fingers turned into tongues of fire. This fire which can set aflame the hearts of disciples is the hallmark of the Guru. Ancient Indian sages envisaged this ideal for the Guru when they spoke of him in the various Upanishads. Now we need to turn our attention to the disciple.

A very Upanishadic interpretation of the Guru/Shishya relationship and a note on the seed mantra in the Tantra tradition.

A very well known hymn in the Taittiriya Upanishad has the following verse which sets the dynamics of the guru-shishya relationship:

AUM saha navavatu, saha nau bhunaktu

Saha veeryam karvaavahai

Tejasvi naa vadhita mastu

maa vid vishaa va hai

AUM shaantih, shaantih, shaantih.

Let us together (-saha) be protected (-na vavatu) and let us together be nourished (-bhunaktu) by God’s blessings. Let us together join our mental forces in strength (-veeryam) for the benefit of humanity (-karvaa vahai). Let our efforts at learning be luminous (-tejasvi) and filled with joy, and endowed with the force of purpose (-vadhita mastu). Let us never (-maa) be poisoned (-vishaa) with the seeds of hatred for anyone. Let there be peace and serenity (-shaantih) in all the three universes.

So, the traditional understanding of the guru-shishya relationship within Hindu paradigms is very clear: it is an invitation for both together to undertake an amazing journey within the very crucibles of their own true selves. It is an interior journey which does not wish ill to anyone but nonetheless a necessary salvific/moksha seeking journey. It is only the Guru who can transport the seeker from samsara/this world of vanity to the world of no-return/Nirvikalpa Samadhi. It is said of Swami Vivekananda that the very touch on him by the feet of his Master, Sri Ramakrishna, transported him into Samadhi and thus propelled the latter to begin his own journey to become the Swami Vivekananda. In Mahanirvana Tantra we learn that Tantric powers, or the rituals of Shakti (power) worship were to be handed down from solely the Guru. The Guru, as it were, planted the seed-mantra or vija-mantra into the disciple who was never to reveal it to anyone ever. This secrecy is not cultic in nature but rather symbolic: the relationship between the shishya and the Guru was to be intimate and the soul’s progress as hidden as the progress of a tryst ( see the life of Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Purana):

Studies of religious sects in India led by renouncer gurus show the signal importance of mantras in initiating neophytes into a given lineage or tradition of renouncers. This initiation is the mantra-diksha. The guru whispers the mantra in the disciple’s ear, and with that the disciple is ushered in as one of the group. All members of a given devotionalist order share the tradition’s mantra, but it remains unknown to outsiders. The mantra in a guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) lineage or sampradaya serves to distinguish insiders from outsiders and bind the insiders together in a common bond of knowledge and practice. ^[3]

                                    Thus in ancient India we see an emerging pattern of the guru’s relationship with the seeker. In short it had to be based on confidence in the power of the Guru to transform the seeker’s very essence ( see the conversation of Nachiketa and Yama in the Kathoponisad), of the transformative power of what is passed on from the Guru to the disciple (see the Tantras, for examples):

These esoteric doctrines and practices are not transmissible by means of the written word alone; they can be realized by the aspirant (shishya) only in the context of study with a master or guru , and full transmission of the Tantric insights occurs only in this context. Not surprisingly, the role of the guru is central in Tantric practice, and the guru— shishya relationship is of the first importance. Once the shishya has been accepted by the guru, the student must submit entirely and unquestioningly to the teacher’s direction, however harsh or perverse it may appear. The guru will gauge theshishya’s progress towards the goal, will suggest suitable practices, and will gradually unfold the deeper Tantric mysteries as the shishya becomes fit to receive them. (For an analogous attitude to the master—student relationship, and of face-to-face transmission of doctrine, cf. the essays on the Zen thinkers Dogen and Hakuin.) The relationship of Milarepa to his guru Marpa is the most famous example of such in Tibetan thought. It will be no surprise that all the leading thinkers in the Tibetan tradition have the title ‘guru’ or ‘great guru’, as is the case with Padmasambhava.^[4] and of the need of the disciple to pay obeisance to the Guru (Guru-dakshina) and finally in some cases the need for the shishya to be chaste during internship with the Guru ( see the Codes of Manu for these chastity-injunctions). All these are today thought to be redundant in a globalized India where one can hardly trust anyone as the Guru for the latter often look out for gullible disciples to be conned ( see The Guide by R. K. Narayan).

Contemporary understanding of the Guru/shishya relationship within Indian lived Hinduism.

When this writer was a child, his family (kula) Guru visited his parents and both of his parents first washed their Guru’s feet and drunk that water as nectar- of- the- feet or Charana-amrita. Then they paid obeisance to him by prostrating at his feet and touching  his feet with their fore-heads. Today’s scenario has changed. Indian tradition is not a static entity. Now we have the same obeisance but not in this highly ritualized manner. the contemporary Indian Hindu, at least, in Eastern India no longer believes in this binary. The highly adaptive Indian traditions has now pointed out, after Foucault and Zizek, that such power dynamics may be in fact too lopsided to be effective as promoters of self-actualization. Rapid globalisation and opening up of the Indian markets has perforce steered the secular Indian Hindu to opt out of the trappings of the past including what is often idealised as the guru/shishya relationship.^[5]

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[1] Guru Brahma Gurur Vishnu

Guru Devo Maheshwaraha

Guru Saakshat Para Brahma

Tasmai Sree Gurave Namaha…Guru Stotra.

[2] See Ward, Benedicta. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

[3] Maya Warrier, Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 55.

[4] Diané Collinson, Kathryn Plant, and Robert Wilkinson, Fifty Eastern Thinkers(London: Routledge, 2000), 181.

[5]India has rapidly progressed from an under-developed nation to one of the most quickly booming nations of the world. See Kothari, Rajni, D. L. Sheth, and Ashis Nandy, eds. The Multiverse of Democracy: Essays in Honour of Rajni Kothari. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996, to understand this rapid development and secularization of values in our nation.

 

Pedophilia or Child Abuse

She is happy because she is being turned into a Lolita? Bull crap.

In our own times there is

The monster Fritzl

a monster who raped his own daughterin his own house’s specially built cellar and then raped her some more. He kept the secret to himself and mind you, he did not care a fig that his

The pic is enough

grandchildren were his own children. His name is Joseph Fritzl.  A decent Austrian gentleman, if you please. He sometimes took

The bastard took relaxed massages in Thailand when his daughter and grandchildren starved

relaxed vacations in Thailand with his wife. The daughter and his grandchildren/children through this exercise of power could vanish for all he cared. He had seven kids with his daughter and one more who died of respiratory problems. Alleluia. God be praised, the rape victims’ bellies be raised.

In our own backyards of New Delhi we have

On the left is the rich Pandher and on the right is his cannibal stooge Kohli

the businessman duo of Pandher and Kohli.The former raped minors and the latter literally cooked and ate them up, all the time smacking his lecherous lips.

Human brain must be so tasty. Yak!

How are children for dessert? For you and I all this may be gross but for these gentlemen children are fit as adult human beings to be tortured and even, eaten.

And let us not forget those great abusers who still roam free:

The Christian Brothers really should have put up this sign board on many of their schoolss

the Christian Brothers of Ireland, Australia and Canada. They formed what came to be known as sex-rings where one Brother told the other brother which boys were susceptible and how each Brother had a duty to keep mum; everything for the sake of God: that Holy Gentleman who allows such perversions to occur.Those greatly scholarly men, the members of

The cartoon says it all.

the Society of Jesus in Boston, Germany and Alaska showed their true colours. They treated the children entrusted to them as puppies. Most of these men of the cloth had

Gentlemen raping boys

a taste for the rears of young boys. Yak! Again what is repulsive for you and I is tasty to perverts.

Let’s have a look what child abusers think when they rape little kids and why they do it:

• 

  I am at a loss for words

  They think kids to be smaller versions of adults. In their criminal way of thinking the best way to shag off is to do it to children for the latter are powerless anyway.And even the most amateur psychologist will tell you that often sex is all

  

  It is so cool to scream at a kid. S/he cannot scream back! Again, Bull crap.

  about power. So go for the little ones. Christ had asked that the little ones be not prevented from coming to him. A large section of the Catholic clergy took the counsel to heart and welcomed the little one with open arms and naked genitalia. Amen.

• Adult wo/men have the power to cry foul and deny sex to the aggressor. In short, they might be able to prevent rapes. This frightens the perverts. They have to jack off and the best way is to go after kids. The latter cannot protest and hence their silence is taken to be consent. See the weird reasoning: someone sneaks into a five year old’s  bed  and then fondles her/him and because the kid is shit scared, s/he does not protest; the perpetrator thinks it is okay to do this year after year.
• Children are the weakest links in our societies. They trust easily; they want warmth and are naturally afraid of bogey-men. They really will believe that if they spill the beans that their all –cool uncle or super-dad is sexually abusing them every night, then not only they will be murdered in cold blood but also their moms. So they withdraw into their own selves and become neurotic and more often than not, later in life, psychotic.
• There just happens to be wo/men who simply cannot handle other wo/men of their own age. They are scared and suffer from inferiority complexes. These just cannot have meaningful relationships with adults. They natural gravitate to kids.

 

What does child abuse do to kids and to those same kids when they grow up?

• The child loses interest in her environment. S/he becomes withdrawn and exhibits false dyslexia and autism. Increasingly the child suffers from anxieties which might lead to somatoform disorders.
• Academic grades fall and the child slowly becomes submissive and passive to all other aggressions in her life.
• S/he starts distrusting all adults around her.
• S/he tries to escape into a fantasy world of her own, sowing the seeds of psychosis.
• As adults they are at high risks of first developing
  

  The prodromal curve

  prodromal syndromes and then proceed to full blown schizophrenia.

• Most adult victims suffer from severe phobias and
  

  See the connection?

  depression.

• They have problems forming stable bonds with their spouses and close ones.
• They might become drug/substance abusers.
• They do badly in their jobs, finding it hard to keep at one job for too long.
• They suffer from bouts of anger.
• In rare cases they might either be frigid, promiscuous or erotomanic

 

I shall be very short on the treatment of those who are so brutalized in their childhood:

1.)    You HAVE to take anti-obsessives, anti-depressants and sedatives under a neuropsychiatrist.

2.)    You HAVE to be in therapy using one or more of the talking cures.

3.)    You Have to come to terms with what happened to you within the soteriology (salvation history) of your religion. The latter really did nothing for you to begin with.

 

 

Individual Spiritual Therapy for Couples in Trouble

It is a heresy to think love as merely spiritual; it is physical and ought to be so even if some retard thinks it to be Platonic

We are going to speak today of heterosexual couples today. And let us not start with the mistake of thinking of a couple as a

I do not like this pic; the woman is too much under the man

unit/monad. This is the start of madness. To consider two people as one is to insult both their individualities: each is a self-actualized person. I disagree with the term couple therapy or couple’s spiritual counselling. It is definitely not doing therapy to the wo/man. The spiritual director might need to meet each couple together once in a blue moon but it is in the best interest of the four entities involved to interact as a triad: God +wife (girlfriend/female live in partner) + spiritual counsellor and God + husband (boyfriend/male live in partner) + spiritual counsellor. After writing this I am sure both Christian & Hindu fundamentalists will bay for my blood.

Marriage will be passe in fifty years . live in partnership is the way forward. whether we want it or not

The reality is that people increasingly do not marry for fears that love will die and long term commitments to the other. As a spiritual director I cannot only serve one class of couples; the happily married sort.

Why do I consider a woman and a man separate in a solid relationship? The man has a different outlook to life and different

The psychoanalytic fantasy sytem.

fantasy system(literally and

The world of Fantasy

psychoanalytically) than the woman. Both the woman and man might first of all seek therapy of any sort because they are clashing at their basic unconscious levels. If that is so, then why start a fighting match in the very first spiritual counselling session. Heck, their approaches to God may be radically different. Their physical needs and responses may be different and it is the job of the spiritual counsellor to help them accept the way they are and their partner is. For example, the wife may not like public displays of affection whereas the man may be an

French Kissing in Public may not be for everybody

‘I love French kissing in the mall’ sort of guy. The guy may be a sucker for parties and the evening drink; the woman might love nothing more than having a pizza at home watching a good soap. And indeed love may be waning between them. The relationship was fun in the beginning and now it is only drudgery and ‘I know better than you’ or let’s have our own affairs on the side. You keep quiet and I’ll say nary. Finally, to be honest old Dr. Freud was not too off the mark when he said that the libido is all.He’s got an

Erection Problems

erectile dysfunction

Male genital anatomy

and she’s got a ‘my body is the temple of sin’ complex

The woman feels she is to pure to be touched!

. As is usual with me I shall proceed step by step to try to help you folks.

When to approach a psychiatrist:

• When both of you have lost interest in sex. He cannot get it up or keep it in and you cannot for the love of anything spread your legs. Drugs can help in both conditions. There are two classes of drugs for keeping it up and delayed ejaculation: PDE5 inhibitor class of medicines. They will sort out your erectile dysfunction problem and then there are select classes of anti-depressants which will help you to ejaculate after sometime. For your girlfriend/missus antidepressant or anti-obsessives will do, either alone or in combination. You have to consult an MD neuropsychiatrist to go to the roots of both your aridity. Some of the greatest problems that couples face is lack of having sex and their powerlessness to do anything for it except blaming each other.
• If you are live-in partners or experimenting with your bodies, please use condoms and have after-sex oral contraceptives ready. Believe you me, you neither want to have
  

  The deadly HIV virus...if you get it due to your own carelessness you are to bid adieu to life.Sorry.

  HIV or some other

  

  Venereal Infections. Beware. Do not have multiple sex partners.

  venereal diseases or have a baby out of wedlock. Take help from gynaecologists to know more. There is no shame involved. The gynaecologist has seen more cases like you than you’d ever want to know.

  

  Syphhilitic lesions on the body

  .

• Lastly, if you are facing organic diseases of your genitalia you need to visit a gynaecologist; if you have high blood pressure or hyper or hypo thyroid conditions then too you need to go to doctors. In the first case, a good cardiologist and in the second case to an endocrinologist. If you are suffering from common infection of the genito-urinary tract then you need to visit either a gynaecologist or a specialist in venereal diseases. Dermatologists too can help.
• If both of you are passing through mid-life crises; men have them too, you might need hormone therapy. Post-menstrual women sometimes need specialised treatment from psychiatrists to tide over their blues. Menstruation too can cause mood fluctuations which are rumoured to be alleviated by evening primrose oil. Solid research on this prophylactic is lacking. It is best to then consult a gynaecologist.
• Is there a lack of freedom in your relationship? If she talks to another guy do you steam and if he even looks at a pretty rack, you holler the hell out of your house? If this is true, you need shrink help faster the better.

When to visit a marriage counsellor:

• After you have exhausted all the possibilities listed above and have had no improvement in your relationship with each other approach a marriage counsellor. Some psychologists specialise in couple therapy and they have their various modes of helping. But I have problems with marriage/couple therapists because they are 1) super-expensive and 2) they often treat their clients as inevitably going the primrose path of separation and 3) they treat the couple as a monad. I strongly disagree with this last view. The woman has her set of issues and the man has his set of issues so they need not see eye to eye but neither should they be bogged down by their differences.

By now, those who read my blog know that I am very distrustful of alternative therapies and my first course of action is to pop pills. It sounds gross but keep in mind that pills are God’s gift to womankind if used carefully. I do not agree with those who think we are not neurotransmitter-mediated machines. I firmly believe we are chiefly biological machines with souls introjected at our conceptions when the zygote comes into being. Otherwise we are not that different from the big apes. The rest is mumbo-jumbo, sorta king of the nowhere. This is why I request folks to exhaust naturally curable causes of marital/live-in discords before approaching a spiritual director for couple therapy. No harm if you are happy and to approach a director independently to polish your souls. But then this post is really not for you. I am focussing in those who are in deep crap.

What to expect from spiritual counselling if your relationship is breaking apart? And here unlike in the first two cases, there are two directors: God who in reality will let Her wish known and the director herself who will try to facilitate your connection to the Transcendent so that you can come to see reality as it is and take your own decisions.

• Clarity of sorts. You will be able to map your past life with your husband/boyfriend or live-in partner and see how things have turned out from the beginning. Does it seem natural to you, the soup you are in or is it of your own making?
• Do you see a pattern of Divine Will in your staying together or having met and fallen in love in the first instance?
• What role does
  

  A family which prays together stays together --- Mother Teresa

  meditation/prayer and solitude play in your relationship with your partner?

• How will you be financially affected by your continuation of the marriage or ending it?
• Whom are you running away from? Are you too much like either of your parents and you got married in the hope that you will have a big chest or cushy breasts to cry upon? Wake up buddy, spiritual counselling will show the reality of marriage or any commitment: you are there as friends and for the kinky stuff and both of you enjoying the trip to God.
• The spiritual director’s job is NOT to patch up your relationship but provide you a patient hearing and help you to come to your own decisions.

Keep it in mind that it is God who guides and it is Her Will we will figure out. You don’t need to go bonkers just because you fight with your spouse daily, from my experience it is sweet and we do make up daily. Neither do you have to carry on in a

If you fight too much and uncontrollably then u may need to visit a psychiatrist for mood stablizers

shit relationship where your partner

Is your Partner sucking out your life force. Then it is time to move on buddy

vampirically sucks out your élan vital. The spiritual guide will help you to balance your lives with the help of psychology and God.

 

Spiritual Counselling for Rape Victims

The horror of rape

Spiritual direction is also for the recovering traumatised victim of serious

If some bastard did this to you, you have to report him to the authorities

physical assault.  In this post I shall deal with one of the most

If we could only wish away the injustices of this world: we need to stand up against silences: the spiritual guide will help you fight back

hushed up and degrading of assaults:

The powerlessness of the victim

rape of women.  What is taken away from the victim is her autonomy, her sense of self-worth which is subsumed by sense of guilt and personal worthlessness. Patriarchy imposes such demeaning thoughts in the victim as “did my dress ask for it?”; “maybe I was dressed like a vamp” or in fact,

Did she ask for it? If your answer is yes, you are unfit to live ...

it “was my destiny” to be raped. And in most situations the victim repeatedly has nightmares and simply cannot carry on with life as before. It is not unheard of that the victims have been asked by callous jokers (sometimes their own husbands) whether by chance they had enjoyed the sex. Often rape-victims cannot turn to anyone for help and this post in a systematic manner will try to help them wherever they are. You are not alone.

• 

  Rapists try to silence and break the wills of their victims: you have to fight back.

  First and foremost you did not ask for it, neither did you deserve it.  No way what has been done to you is right and has any rationale. The bastard who did this to you needs to be punished. If you cannot immediately turn to law-enforcement agencies then you need to live now to avenge another day. How will you do that?

• Seek out two people: a neuropsychiatrist and a psychotherapist. You need both. Because if you do not seek both medical help and the talking cures you will suffer now or later from varieties of Post Traumatic Syndromes and severe depression.  The doctor will give you anti-depressants and most probable a short course of sedatives to get over the night mare that had become suddenly so real for you. The psychotherapist will help you with the space to face up to your own fear and boost your own self-image.
• Your body is your body and the bastard who tried to defile you, did not defile your body: he tried to break your will. Those perverts always try to play a game of power with their victims. One of the results of this will be your own resultant frigidity. Your marital life will suffer since naturally your libido will decrease. Thus it is all the more important that apart from first consulting a psychiatrist and a therapist you now turn to serotonin releasing Yoga and other physical exercises.  They will enhance your libido and reduce your panic attacks. But without those pills and therapy, it will not help much.
• Now comes the tough part: get yourself checked for HIV infection, syphilis and other common venereal diseases and rare but not impossible unwanted pregnancy. I do not elaborate here on these for I take it for granted that none of these would have happened to you. In the unfortunate case that some or all of these occur to you, you need more intense and aggressive medical and talk-therapy. The earlier these can be initiated, the better.

If a rape victim were to ask me why God allowed such a curse to befall her, in spite of all my studies on the Problem of Evil, religion and spiritual counselling I’d just have to say I do not know. For the victim, rape is too real and not Maya, not an illusion to wish away. It is the worst form of male aggression to befall on women. Here the effort is to wish away the victim’s Self by the demonic male. It is unutterably unexplainable through metaphysics. Words fail.  All discourses fail and abjection is the only word which can describe the situation. God, apparently, is not doing a good job.

So where does spiritual counselling come into the picture? Rape instantly denudes the victim of any faith either in humanity or the transcendent. Even if religion is the opium of the masses, it is a necessary opium. This author is baffled by the mystery of such violence/sadism.  The logos is decentred in the rape victim. Her selfhood stands bereft of all meaning. The spiritual counsellor can come in after the drugs have kicked in and the secular talk-therapy is at work. Using behaviour therapies applicable to phobias, the spiritual director will go to work. Notwithstanding the enormity of the crime against the victim, the spiritual director having Faith in God/Brahman/the Divine, will co-opt God in the annihilated discourse of the rape-victim and help her reorient her life along natural justice.The Kauravas attempted to

Real victims of rape; our contemporary Draupadis.

gang-rape

Notice Hari above saving Draupadi/ this is the prototype for spiritual counselling of rape victims within the Hindu context

Draupadi, the Lord Hari saved her. Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene was also raped and her interaction with Christ forms the prototype for Christian therapy for the rape victim

was repeatedly raped. Christ saved her. These are the prototypes for rape counselling from a spiritual angle. The spiritual guide can start from where secular discourses are silenced by the transgression of the sanctity of the female body. The healing has to carry on now at the level of the heart and soul. The psychiatrist and the therapist can definitely heal the mind and the body. The spiritual director can try to heal the soul. 

 

Gestalt therapy as a valuable tool for Spiritual Direction

Freud stressed

Freud's conception of the mind

the mind and its inner recesses.  This left little room for the whole person who ought to have been the focus of his therapy. He was obsesses with the libido and genital fixations of his patients. It is too well known that he was also compulsively occupied with the infantile histories of his patients. Psychoanalysis including that of Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein herself had a very disturbed childhood and adulthood suffering many depressive episodes

stressed childhood events over the psychic life of the patients in the here and the now. As an illustration, she uses such terms as the combined parent figure instead of the Freudian Oedipal construct (the child, according to her is

One of the traumatic events in the life of an infant according to Klein is to see both parents having sex

traumatised seeing the copulation of both the parents); she talks of the child moving from the schizoid –paranoidposition to the

The disturbed child

depressive position. For the infant, according to Klein the breast that feeds the child ( the good breast) forms an imagoof it and the breast that is withdrawn is perceived as a bad breast since the child thinks that it is withdrawn because it is hated.

The Kleinian good breast

W. Ronald D. Fairbairn (1889-1964), a Scottish psychoanalyst saw this entire projection of the Kleinian defensive techniques and the failure to negotiate it meaningfully as giving rise to mental disorders.  This in turn rudimentarily proves the piecemeal approach of psychoanalysis.  The spiritual director has to be careful in not treating the client in this piecemeal manner. Psychoanalysis is only suitable for certain disorders and not for others. For example, it has hardly anything to offer to the severely psychotic patient or to autistic individuals (this notwithstanding the contrary claims of psychoanalysts). Freud himself expressed his frustration over psychotic patients and if the truth be told he had once written that psychoanalysis was good for his finances and did little for the neurotics that he encountered in practice. Gestalt therapy on the other hand is much more suitable to the spiritual directee and director dyad. God wants to deal with the whole human person in the here and the now and if we are to believe theologians of all major religions then S/he has already forgotten our pasts and loves us unconditionally in the present. Within Hinduism, the active Godhead, the Prakriti part of the false binary of the Purusha/Prakriti loves us individually. In Buddhist metaphysics, the Bodhisattvas are concerned with every individual living creature attaining Nirvana. So the Transcendent, the Divine wants to embrace even the inhospitable Other in a very personal way. Gestalt therapy is a concrete way forward for the spiritual director to embrace the soul of the client not as client but as an imago of the director’s own self. Clinical distance is then necessarily effaced.

A Gestalt approach to life is whole above the sum of its parts and is a perception of the beholding senses and not merely a given reality. It is a concept which developed through the German poet Goethe (1749-1832) and then through the Austrian philosopher and psychologist Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and later through the influential writings of Christian von Ehrenfels (1859- 1932). Max Wertheimer (1880- 1943) popularised the movement beyond Europe. The advantage that Gestalt therapy provides over other forms of psychotherapy is that it deals with the subjective state of the client in her totality. Thus when the spiritual director takes this approach and relates to the client, s/he cannot stop at just enquiring of the mental/spiritual state of the directee. Naturally the director has to evaluate every aspect of the client’s life: how is her health? how is her energy level? does she feel tired too often? Is s/he able to achieve life goals? how is her relationship with others in the here and the now? what does s/he think of current affairs? where does s/he think the spiritual direction going? How is her relationship with her boyfriend/husband/children/parents/lesbian or gay partners? why does s/he have unprotected sex?  is s/he happy in her job/family life? where does s/he see herself in relationship to the poor (remember that spiritual guidance unlike secular counselling is oriented to the Other drawing its life spirit from the emptying of the self or kenosis, the total giving of the self for other like

St. Francis's attitude is what we seek in spiritual counselling

St. Francis of Assisi who gave away all his clothes to a naked leper he encountered and then went on to embrace the latter. King Gautama gave away all he had to embark on

The Buddha first gave away everything

Buddhahood. Lord Mahavira, the last of the Tirthankaras or forge-builders gave away his last stitch of cloth to embrace humanity at large). Gestalt therapy provides the space for the spiritual seeker and the guide to both see reality as it is, not empirically but through the lens of the heart. It helps breakdown the maze of reason and logic which hide the wiles of the human heart.

 

You should seek neuropsychiatric intervention if you suffer from any of the following symptoms: there is no shame in having mind flu.

I feel his theoretical turn of mind wrongly discredited the demystification of mental illnesses

Ronald D. Laing (1927-89) did disservice to thousands of psychiatric patients globally by his theoretically oriented anti-psychiatry movement.  In book after book he assaulted the profession of psychiatry: The Divided Self, 1960; Sanity, Madness and the Family, 1963 et al. He drew his inspiration from existentialism extrapolating it to construct an intelligible matrix for understanding madness. For example, he would seek to see meaning in the word salad of schizophrenics.  This author is of the opinion that if we treat mental illnesses similarly to the flu or stomach upset then we would be free of the stigma of mental illness. The latter is just another sort of illness to be treated and cured or like asthma or atherosclerosis, controlled.  Here I give a few instances for those who are suffering from some common mental flu. If you feel that you or your dear ones are suffering from some of the following symptoms, by all means seek the help of a neuro-psychiatrist. My aim is to demystify mental illness. Keep in mind that none of the psychotherapies help till organic defects in the brain are corrected. And spiritual counselling comes in much later; after a person has been stabilised by drugs and if necessary, by other psychotherapies. Look at the drug issue in this way: alcohol can disinhibit a person; likewise potent drugs can control the mind.

• 

  Are you depressed? This is one of the easiest illnesses to cure.

  Do you feel like crying and degrading yourself for no reason whatsoever? Do you feel incessantly guilty for a minimum of two weeks? Are you lethargic in the mornings and have you noticed sleep disturbances for at least two weeks?

• 

  In India 75% of schizophrenics have no symptoms after the first break, if they are treated aggressively with atypical anti-psychotics.

  Do you hear voices transmitting over the television directed at you or people around you incessantly talking of you?

  

  Are people always leering at you? May be it is true and then may be not.

• Do you feel
  

  Inner rage which when comes out, it explodes

  explosive bouts of rage and feel like fighting with everyone?

• Do you alternate between eating binges/ spending binges/ have great spurts of energy alternating with lack of energy and sleep for other times?
• Have you repeatedly contemplated suicide? Do you feel it is better to die than face life?
• Do you feel scared while meeting people?
• Are there inner voices talking to you asking you to do bad things? Both to yourself and others?
• Do you think God is talking to you personally or everyone out there is trying to get at you?
• Do thoughts of rape, sadism intrude repeatedly in your daily functioning?
• Do you want to have physical relationships with children?
• Do you see demons or angels around you, talking to you?
• Do you have to do something repeatedly like washing your hands, are you afraid to touch other people due to fear of infections? Do you feel the urge to continually clean the house after guests have visited your home?
• Can you continue in a stable relationship over time or your relationships are highly unstable?
  

  Are you addicted to pornography?

  Are you addicted to sex?

• Are you dependant on drugs or sleeping pills or anti-allergics or alcohol to get you kicks?
• Do you tend to forget things in the immediate past but remember memories in the remote past or the reverse?
• Do your hands shake? Do you suffer from fine tremors?
• Do you enjoy hurting others, playing with fire or have a liking for corpses? Do you get orgiastic when hurting others or burning stuff?
• Are you tremendously ritualistic and religious? Is the God that you believe in a God of wrath, who will send you to hell if you disobey Him? Are you afraid of Him?
• Are you a woman trapped in a man’s body or a man trapped in a woman’s body?
• Are you a
  

  Cross dressing

  man who loves to dress in women’s clothing?

• Do you feel
  

  Frigidity

  frigid while having sex? Are you ashamed of your body and the bodily processes?

• Are you afraid of something so much so that you feel faint on encountering that object?

If you feel any or some of the above are true for you or your dear ones, then you need to visit a neuro-psychiatrist and then a therapist. After continuing with both, you might want to seek spiritual counselling.

 

For whom is Spiritual Counselling?

Who should seek spiritual counselling?

• 

  God wants each of us to freely love Her. S/he is lonely.

  God/Brahman/the Divine calls us anthropomorphically and anthropologically. Our whole self is called by the transcendent. Nothing satisfies us but an engagement with matters metaphysical. If you feel in the core of your being that you need to study/meditate/contemplate the Divine more often, then spiritual counselling is for you. This in no way means retreating from society or giving up your day to day activities, it just means that you are ready to make space (even fifteen minutes a day will do) for the transcendent in your life.

• In this author’s opinion morality as commonly understood has little or nothing to do with the Divine. So if you want to escape the duality of moral injunctions then spirituality is for you. It does not mean a life of hedonism and promiscuity. As we shall find out below, it is just the opposite.  Spiritual counselling helps to negotiate the dualities of love/hatred, joy/sorrow, inflexibility/adaptability etc.  If you feel the inner need to work at your own pace without relinquishing your duties then spiritual counselling is for you. You will not be in the rat race any more, but neither will you give up what is your dharma (duty towards others and yourself). Spiritual counselling helps the client to fulfil goals at her/his own pace — I repeat never relinquishing them. Your profession becomes your vocation.
• 

  Deepen your love; do not fall in love but be in LOVE

  If you are seeking to deepen your relationship with those near to you, those whom you love and respect; then spiritual counselling can help you find inner strength to love others; even to make the inhospitable Other , your own. Levinas wrote on embracing the Other. Spiritual guidance helps you to do just that. It teaches you how to love those whom you already love, better and how not to take love for granted. And then to love those for whom you feel contempt and hatred. You cannot love the Transcendent without loving your fellow wo/men.

• An essential part of spiritual well-being is physical wellbeing.Moderation in everything; the
  

  The Middle Path

  Middle Path of the Buddha, is what spiritual guidance will help you achieve.  If you feel the need to slow down, to accept life as it is, then spiritual guidance will help you. Impulse control and delayed gratification are targets of long term spiritual guidance. Nobody will ask you to radically change your life-style but the spiritual guide will help you become aware of your own pace.

• Most of us do not feel that we are participating in the history of salvation, be it Hindu, Christian or Buddhist. We feel tossed around by circumstances and term coincidences either lucky or unfortunate. We refuse to see the hand of the Divine in our lives. The spiritual guide will slowly help you realise that you are unique and loved personally by God. You are not jetsam; you are fulfilling a certain purpose in life. Everything that comes your way is willed by the Divine.
• The task of the spiritual guide is to make you passionate,
  

  The Spiritual Guide helps you to transform yourself into FIRE

  to make you a source of comfort and light for others. You cannot pursue holiness sitting in the corner of your room. True spiritual guidance will help you to find a path of serving others in your own way. It does not matter how you serve others, but serve you must. You will realise that your family includes the homeless person you used to pretend did not exist.

• Zen Buddhism stresses on mindfulness. When you learn not to encumber the earth and not be encumbered by the woes of this world, you will have mukti (salvation). Spiritual guidance helps you attain this lightness of being.
• Spiritual guidance will help you to slowly remove the emptiness within you. Partying is cool. But after the glittering lights, what remains? Having
  

  Physical intimacy still leaves spaces for individuation and God. Being aware that physicality is a gift from God helps the client to make the act of intercourse an oblation of the self for the other.

  sex is uber-cool? But after coitus what remains? Getting into a spa is refreshing but when you see the sun set, is it not another day irrevocably gone? Spiritual focus can slowly make you realise that in all these if we remember the Divine Who is the essence of everything; then our lives will have meaning.

• Most of us trudge through our daily tasks as if they were bitter pills to compulsorily have.  The spiritual guide helps you discern whether you need to be more focussed in your present job or seek a change.
• It is easy to choose between a good and a bad thing. Normally, the decision to rob a bank for becoming wealthy or to conscientiously save to become wealthy does not need much thought. If it does for you, you need to see a clinical psychologist. But the decision whether to marry or not; whether to continue in a relationship or not; the decision whether to study the humanities or the social sciences need discernment. The spiritual guide cannot decide for you but help you to choose maturely. S/he will use prayer, psychological batteries and long term discernment methods culled from different religions and philosophies to arrive at an acceptable decision which resonates with your heart.Choice between two good things are tough and here enters the role of spiritual counselling.
• Spiritual guidance opens up your heart, breaking down the barriers of reason that entrap us.

 

Integral Formation

Critique of the term “Formation”: a Hindu reading with an emphasis on the psychoanalytical aspect.

Formation, within the context of the Catholic Church is acceptably a quite narrow definition — “formation”  as understood by the Roman Catholic Church is involved in the shaping of vowed Religious within the Church. There are of course, the faith formation of the laity, but that is inter-mediated through this core group of celibate individuals. This author sees ‘formation’ in dual ways: it is the formation of an individual, who need neither be a celibate Catholic wo/man or even a Catholic and also formation should be seen not something that is stressed at one point in one’s life but is an ongoing, lifelong process which carries on till one’s death (with the caveat that will have to follow the first definition of this author regarding the target audience of formation, who need not be Catholic) and in some belief systems, as a process which is carried on from life to life. This author’s own religious system ^[1] insists on reincarnation and repeated births for the one and same individual. So while this author eschews a narrow target audience for the understanding of what constitutes integral formation; the author would refer to such texts as the Tibetan Book of the Dying which sees integral formation as even preparing for the life to come. This latter book details ways in which an individual can and should prepare her whole life to meet not only death but indeed the exact manner of essences that she will meet post-death. So while within the Western traditions, integral formation encompasses psychoanalytic theories right from Freud’s^[2] eternal dialectic of libidinal forces and thanatos or the death urge to the more recent works of humanist psychologists like Carl Rogers who invest the individual with greater autonomy and volition; within the Eastern traditions we have more genuinely holistic views of formation. The ancient way of the Dao, in China; Zen Buddhism in Japan and the Hindu forms of Tantrika^[3] worship seem to this author more authentic ways of formation. Catholic formation processes post-Vatican Council II seems in comparison to the times before that to be more open and positive e.g. the vow of chastity is seen as a greater giving of the self to God in freedom, it is believed to be freeing of individual ties or exclusive friendships so that the autonomous individual can attend to god with her total person-hood. Pre-Conciliar times saw the vow of celibacy as a negative command to abstain from sex. To this author, as will be illustrated briefly below , this is just a hermeneutical tactic to interpret and forcefully impose a central logo-centric doctrine of celibacy which now seems to be liberating and freeing. This notwithstanding the fact that it is now well established within the domains of psychology that the libido should never be tampered with. In well researched text after text, e,g, When the Piano Stops  (2009)^[4], the authors blame prevailing attitudes of formation even as recent as till 2005, for the grave pedophilia-scandals^[5] of the Catholic Church. The formation of the Christian Brothers (of Ireland as distinguished from the Presentation Brothers or the Salesian Brothers) came under tremendous attack from no less than the Jesuit run powerful Tablet^[6] which pointed out that the whole contemporary system of formation for these men had gone horribly wrong. It is now well known, that

It is true if those abusing bastards had kids , only then they would understand how it hurts if one's kid is abused

these Brothers formed sex-rings to practice pederasty on little boys and buried them in their own monasteries ( see Mount Cashel cases of sodomy)^[7]. This author stresses the need to address the libido^[8] in healthy formation for that is one area which we tend to pretend does not exist and yet all our living hours, according to metanalyses of psychological reports, go in tackling this one area of our lives. It is the libido which, according to the likes of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and much nearer home to our own times, Lacan, which forms an individual. This writer finds that Western forms of formation even when applied to lay non-Christian individuals fall short of addressing how to harness the libido, if such a thing is ever possible or even desirable.This paper will critique the formation of individuals within monastic communities and encourage the truly integral formation of individuals to grow in what the Catholic Church calls, the spirit of the Holy Spirit and what in Hinduism is known as Shradhdha (see the Kathoponisad  for the concept of shradhdha).

Tantra and its possible role in integral formation.

This is the allegorical union of the Purusha with Prakriti

Tantra, a much misunderstood system of practices, which also are known as left-handed practices deals head-on with the libido and our inner compulsions to revel in the senses. Tantra, unlike other branches of Hinduism and some forms of Christianity, does not encourage Manicheanism: Tantra sees the soul and the body as being integral to each other; there is no difference between the pneuma and the sarx. Unlike what is written in the first verse of the sixteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, which is nearly impossible for the ordinary person to attain; the Mahanirvana Tantra counsels devotees to have repeated physical intercourse with the opposite sex; the latter person must be willing to engage in such congress and must be of the same age of the practitioner. Then it exhorts its practitioners to not eschew both the eating of pungent, spiced meat and drink ( not the soma or the sweet nectar) hard liquor. Slowly the practitioner will be satiated and the inner fires quenched. The libido will calm down enough to allow an anthropomorphic response of the whole human person to God,for it is God who has allowed us to be libidinal in the first place. The Tantras do not accept any form of repression. The greatest Hindu symbol of this engagement of the libido in the spiritual process if the phallic symbol of

Nataraja

Nataraja within the yoni or vagina of His consort, Parvati. This is a very paradoxical symbol of the Godhead which errant Christian and Islamic puritans have rejected as being sinful and even obscene.And to tone down the real significance of this idol, Hindus on the defensive have compared it to the Chinese yin and yang, or even the Samkhya philosophy’s delineation of the Purusha and Prakriti.  But what it simply means is this: that unless one satisfies one’s

The libido needs attention otherwise insanity occurs

libido, true salvation and self-control can never happen. And it also is a sign against perversions: one is only allowed to have heterosexual congress. While engaging in the act of physical intimacy one is exhorted in the various Tantras to keep God in mind. Thus one slowly is released from the bondage of the senses; otherwise as is well known, even vowed individuals take recourse to onanism ( see the daily diary entries of the Vatican II Pope Roncalli or John XXIII). Hindus worship this symbol of necessary eroticism and find nothing sinful in this. For this author, such an approach is what would make for an integrated formation. Christ and many others echoing him, including the Swami Vivekananda stress celibacy for a minuscule percent of all mankind. Unfortunately, when a large number of people experiment with celibacy, poverty and obedience in any religion, children, our most innocent, tend to suffer^[9].

Anecdotes regarding integral formation.

Here the author digresses with two small exemplary anecdotes: once a very learned Benedictine finished a magisterial history of his Order and sent the volumes to their Prior-general. The latter being truly wise, wrote to this scholar that he should pray more and fall in love once in his lifetime. His works had everything but love. ( This is a true event and as far as this author can recollect it is of the great historian Dom David Knowles whose books are a staple in every seminary in the world). Thomas Merton, was a novice master for a very long time and in this author’s experience of reading the seven journals of Merton, a very spiritual man.

A very human and holy Trappist

Merton during the latter, more mature part of his life engaged with Zen Buddhism and grew both in wisdom as well as solitude. Very few men of his calibre are either found inside or outside of monastery walls. He kept detailed journal entries of his turbulent love-affair with a nurse and in most probability had fathered a son with her. Yet, he did not destroy any of these journals or try to cover up for his affair. This he did, fully knowing that the Church and his loyal devotees will one day think him anathema for what they would consider his sins. But this author sees in this man the true fruit of solitude and divinity: he understood that one cannot love an abstraction, one cannot love all human equally and pretend to be moved by them, neither like some pederasts can one force children to satisfy the deep inner urges of sexual release, nor does a mature person engage in auto-eroticism and pornography. This Novice-Master of the Trappists understood that true formation is to live in existential authenticity. He lived what today would be called an existentially “immersed” life which was de trope. Notice in these two examples and the case of Shiva given earlier, that true formation begins with us approaching what the Hinduism influenced disciple of Freud would term as our anima, as our alter-egos, as the shadows of our true selves. Integrated formation processes would do well to consider analyzing Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad. There, when the time comes to face up to what we truly are, there is uttered the famous words: “The horror. The horror”. It is only when we look into our own inner abysses and cease becoming frightened by what we find there, can we even start any integrative formation. Taboos of all sorts, especially taboos relating to the body and body fluids ( see the works on Leviticus by philosophers like Mary Midgely^[10]), and our fears of breaking taboos of all manners stands in our ways to genuine formation in any Faith.

Summing up:

1. Integral formation must take into account the needs of the human body and not fall into the trap of a Manichean split between the body and the soul.
2. There may be a role for Tantra as a discipline in the forming of individuals in any religion and monastic setting. While one need not break the vow of celibacy etc. to adapt Tantric practices within the monastery, yet there is ample scope for learning from this discipline the need for freedom and gradual ascent. Repression is anathema to integral formation.
3. Integral Formation is required not only for the Catholic Religious, but for all peoples of this world.

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[1]This author is a Hindu-Brahmin. He remains convinced of the fact that we cannot ever eschew our own roots, no matter what we choose to learn or whichever religion we choose to follow. See the epic novel by Alex Hailey; Haley, Alex. Roots. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. This novel is an autobiographical classic of the black-American experience.

[2]Freud remains relevant in all discussions of psychology for every single psychologist after Freud till our own times has either agreed with him or rejected him. They could never have done anything without Freud, much in the same way that Plato helped Western Philosophy to flourish. Alfred North Whitehead had perceptively remarked that all Western philosophy was merely a footnote to Plato. The same analogy applies to Freud and latter psychologists. It is interesting to note that:

“…psychoanalysis had become the single most prominent school of psychology and psychotherapy in the world, one capable of attracting a steady stream of students and followers not only from the medical specialties but also from the arts and humanities…Freud’s own stature had grown in proportion to the latent scientific and philosophical dimensions that had informed the topic of neurosis from the start…religious and mystical sentiments … Freud personally abhorred.”

See Kerr, John. Introduction. In A Most Dangerous Method: the Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, 7. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.

[3]Tantrik practices are called ‘bamachara’ or the left-handed practice for it involves an immersion in sex, drinks and the fulfilment of desires. This is in direct contradiction to right-handed practices such as are found in the Upanishads. While the latter call for great and immediate renunciation of sensuality, the former revels in sensuality and thus allows free-play to Freud’s conception of the libido. I see the Upanishadic texts as repressive for the beginner in the spiritual life while I see Tantra as a fit beginning to the non-initiate in the spiritual life. The Tantras have been consistently misunderstood and have achieved notoriety in the Christian world as being merely sex-manuals. This is a gross misunderstanding which needs rigorous correction.

[4]See the eminently readable McCall, Catherine. When the Piano Stops: a Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2009.

[5]                     “States have a responsibility under international law to criminalise violence against women such as sexual exploitation and abuse. Failure to do so is a violation of obligations to prevent, punish, and investigate acts of violence, and to provide remedy for violence perpetrated against women. At the level of customary law, states have an obligation to exercise due diligence to prevent harm committed by both state and private actors”

It is important to note that private actors too have a role to play in curbing sexual violence. Contemporary Catholic Church hierarchy has only recently awakened to its duties towards abuse victims as a private institutional actor. This author contends that blind obedience inculcated in novitiates have a detrimental effect on novices. See O’Brian, Melanie. “State Responsiblitity for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse as Human Rights Violations by Peacekeepers.” Ethics, Evil, Law and the State. Ed. Aoife Padraigín Foley. First ed. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary, 2011. 18. Print. Inter-Disciplinary. See also the widely available Murphy Report available as a facsimile PDF file on the internet. It does indict Church personnel for gross cover-ups and lacunae in the priestly formation process. The Report states at section 1.32:

“Another consequence of the obsessive concern with secrecy and the avoidance of scandal was the failure of successive Archbishops and bishops to report complaints to the Gardaí [police] prior to 1996. The Archbishops, bishops and other officials cannot claim that they did not know that child sexual abuse was a crime. As citizens of the State, they have the same obligations as all other citizens to uphold the law and report serious crimes to the authorities.”

This secrecy and protectiveness is the bane of Religious Formation: to teach novices to blindly obey their superiors and also to blindly cover up for the sake of propriety their Congregation’s short-comings is a scourge. It will be worthwhile to note that St. Ignatius of Loyola said that if God so willed and the Society of Jesus’s existence became contrary to the Will of the Pope, that is sinful in its very existence, he would dissolve the Society and pray for fifteen minutes and get along with the business of life.

[6]Gill, Alan. “The Tablet – Children for Export.” Editorial. The Tablet, August 08, 1998.

[7]See the film The Boys of St. Vincent. Directed by John N. Smith. Performed by Henry Czerny, Johnny Morina and Brian Dooley. Montreal, Canada: National Film Board of Canada, 1992. Dramatic Miniseries.

[8] See Sophia E. Forster, and Donald L. Carveth, “Christianity: a Kleinian Perspective,” Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 7, no. 2 (1999).

[9]How we treat our children, the least powerful in the pecking order, is symptomatic of how mature we are in mind, body and spirit. The following is an excerpt from the Cloyne report, easily available as a PDF online:

Monsignor O’Callaghan always had reservations about reporting to

the civil authorities.   In June 2002, in a letter to a canon lawyer, he stated:

“On the issue of reporting to civil authorities I have always been of

your mind and endorse everything you say. I am convinced that

reporting should have been left to the complainants. Our role in the

whole process has been compromised by taking on direct reporting as

part of our remit. Why should we take it on ourselves to report when

the complainant does not want it done? This commitment on our part

also seriously compromises our relationship with the priest against

whom allegations have been made.”

He failed to understand that the requirement to report was for the protection

of other children.” [my highligting]

[10] See for example, Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature. London: Routledge, 1995.