Reply to Buddhism and Gestalt

• Buddhism and Gestalt by Philip Brownell, 12/6/96
  
  

Phil,

My immediate response is that I have found that when I look at many religions and philosophies and psychologies, I can find great difference...particularly if I focus on the more surface level aspects. I have also found that each religion or psychology at it's core has many more similarities for me than differences and this is already a thread of this forum...similarities and differences.

I have found that Buddhism, like Gestalt, touches on much that is paradoxical. I was for a long time uncomfortable with the Buddhist perspective on ego until one day a friend brought me back the Buddhist equivalent of the Gideon Bible...one that is left in hotel rooms for people to read.

It told a parable. "A mother took her sick child to a doctor.The doctor gave the child medicine and instructed the mother not to nurse the child until the medicine was digested.

The mother anointed her breast with something bitter so that the child would keep away from her of her own volition. After the medicine had time enough to be digested, the mother cleansed her breast and let the child suck her. The mother took this method of saving her child out of kindness because she loved the child.

Like the mother in the parable, Buddha in order to remove misunderstanding and to break up attachments to an ego-personality, denies the existence of an ego; and when the misunderstanding and attachments are done away with, then he explains the reality of the true mind that is Buddha nature."

I think from a gestalt perspective we might call this paradoxical-paradoxical theory of change?

• Another Reply to Buddhism and Gestalt by Stuart Stawman, 12/11/96