EASTERN CONTRIBUTIONS TO HEALING TRAUMA
The trauma of imperialism and the trauma caused by modern life that reinforces the pathologies that led to imperial conquest in the first place need to be addressed on a worldwide scale. As Thomas Hubl notes, there must be an integration of the findings of the psychological, neurological, epigenetic, and sociocultural fields with the mystical paths to healing and being human. Science and spirit come together as present-day insights and ancient wisdom enhance each other.
The great scholar of Islam, Seyyed Hossein Nasr points out that the Enlightenment does not offer the teachings and practices that enable humans to uncover their wholeness; this requires intellectual intuition and contemplation, universal ways of gaining knowledge that are found at the spiritual core of all the world religions. Nasr also demonstrates how world religions, when properly interpreted, provide an indispensable foundation for an ecological ethic. Let’s take a brief look at the spiritual core of the world religions in the four Eastern civilizations and what they might contribute to healing trauma.
The esoteric and mystical teachings of the major religions in Eastern civilizations share a philosophy of non-dualism. This is needed to counteract the modern tendency toward fragmentation in which mind and body, self and other, humans and nature, the individual and the cosmos are conceived and experienced as existing in isolation from each other. I will now give an example from each Eastern civilization of a non-dualist philosophy that can be integrated with Western therapies and modalities in order to address the traumas faced by people all over the world. Of course, other peoples and civilizations outside the West and the East have much to offer but that is not my focus here.
Japanese intellectuals like the Kyoto philosopher Masao Abe have located the strength of Zen Buddhism in its ability to have no attachment to thinking. This enables the self to experience itself from the inside and to recognize that reason can never know things as they truly are. Therefore, Zen enables one to act from No-mind which then gives life to one’s thoughts. Only action from this space of No-mind is truly free. The main weakness of Zen is that its approach of Non-thinking often ends up as merely not-thinking, that is, the failure to think. Then Zen falls short of inspiring positive and creative thinking that can address the major ethical and social issues of our time, even though it is capable of doing so. Zen can contribute to freeing the individual from trauma and also has the potential to heal collective trauma.
The Confucian scholar, Tu Weiming, in his critique of the Enlightenment mentality, has called for a move beyond the politics of domination, the exploitation of nature, and the pursuit of private interests to a revitalized Confucian ethics. Confucian ideals of self-cultivation, the dignity of the person, family cohesiveness, and social solidarity can enable East Asians to realize their full humanity. The West has developed the individual while ignoring the role of relationships in human development; it has emphasized personal realization but not moral self-knowledge; it has promoted individual freedom without fostering the sense of duty and responsibility. Confucian disciplines of self-cultivation and ways of connecting the self to the local area, the community, the natural environment, and the cosmos provide a foundation for building social institutions that no longer reinforce collective trauma.
In India, British colonialism had the positive effect of stimulating Hindus to reform their religious practices and institutions. Although this religious orientation did not spread beyond the upper classes, it was a foundation for Rabindranath Tagore’s advocacy of Asian spirituality as a challenge to Western materialism. At about the same time Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent movement for independence attracted worldwide attention, showing what a spiritualized politics might be like. In more recent times, the spread of India’s spiritual philosophies such as Vedanta and practices like yoga and meditation to the West is an indicator of their great potential for the healing of individual trauma.
Islam can serve as an inspiration for addressing the trauma of gender discrimination. Sadiyya Shaikh, the South African Muslim scholar, praises the medieval mystic and philosopher, Ibn Arabi, for expressing some of the most vibrant notions of gender within Islamic thought. “Balancing more sovereign theological images of divine power that bid existence into being, Ibn Arabi also describes God’s primordial creativity through feminine images of pregnancy, labor, and birthing, foregrounding a relationship of fullness, identity, connection, and interiority vis-à-vis God.” She adds that he brings together divine qualities such as mercy and beauty with the great majesty of the divine, clearly and forcefully arguing that men and women have equal spiritual abilities and that both share in the archetype of the “complete human.”
There are also spiritual traditions with animistic outlooks that can help bridge humans and nature. In Japan, the Shinto teachings and practices are being examined as a source of native ecological wisdom. In China and India, opposition to government development plans that damage the environment comes mostly from local peoples attempting to preserve their ways of life based on religious outlooks that emphasize the interconnection with nature.
Spiritual Approaches and the Healing of Trauma
We are entering an era in which Western dominance and US hegemony may not endure. Rather than overtaking the West in order to gain primacy, Eastern peoples have an opportunity for civilizational renewal by reviving their spiritual traditions. Zen Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, the Yogic tradition, and Sufism can help heal the trauma of imperialism and the social pathologies that have stood in the way of intercivilizational dialogue, even though until now they have tended not to be used for this purpose. Equally significant, though, is that Western people can also make use of these traditions, integrating them with the more scientifically based approaches that have been sprouting up in their own societies over the past half-century or so.
I have invoked some of the spiritual traditions of Eastern civilization that are relevant to the healing of civilizational trauma. “Eastern” in this context means not so much a geographical area and even less a cultural sphere; the reference is to the parts of the world that have bequeathed to us spiritual traditions of a mystical and esoteric nature whose philosophies and practices are relatively intact. In contrast, Western elites have largely succeeded in suppressing the corresponding mystical and esoteric traditions in the West, although we do have texts like those of Meister Eckhart and The Cloud of Unknowing which indicate that the spiritual cleansing was never total.
An unfortunate tendency in the Western world has been to adopt the practices of Eastern religions as avenues for personal enlightenment, while neglecting to use them as a means of healing trauma. This approach can be a way of avoiding an encounter with the shadow, both individual and cultural. Personal and collective trauma, when unaddressed, are often great obstacles to cultural vitality and creativity, since they ensure that the present is mostly a repetition of past patterns that have become frozen over time. Practices like meditation and witnessing can bring up traumatic material that has been repressed and disowned, but such material needs to be faced and contemplated, not denied. Only then will the impact of past trauma be lessened.
Of course, this same hands-off orientation has long existed in Eastern as well as in Western civilizations. As Masao Abe points out in the case of Japanese Zen, letting go of the attachment to thinking has led to non-thinking and failure to apply the insights of Zen to social and political issues. In addition, Japanese Buddhist sects, including Zen, often collaborated with the ultranationalist government during the Second World War, violating their foundational principle of human equality.
There are basic esoteric principles that can serve as the bedrock for a way of life that neither creates individual and collective trauma nor refrains from applying mystical insights to collective trauma. The equality of all human beings is upheld and this principle rests upon an experiential base which gives it solidity. Instead of appealing to the abstractions of reason, the experience of human equality occurs when, through spiritual practice, the sense of separate self dissolves. The ego gives up its role as master to accept its appropriate place as the servant of a higher self that is conscious of unity.
At the individual level, there is recognition that what has been taken as the self is the conditioned ego mind. Once this separate self is no longer identified with, it is possible to let go of the conditioning and fears that have dictated personal behavior until that time. This means acknowledging rather than denying and repressing the trauma. At the collective level, the experience of oneness or unity brings forth empathy and compassion for those who, in the deepest sense, are my very self. The impulse to project the rejected parts of the myself on the other is observed and let go. The desire to treat the other as the source of my problems makes no sense when the origin of personal difficulties is seen as within my own self.
The ability to stop blaming others for personal difficulties and to face our traumas is supplemented by a realization of oneness with not just others but with nature as well. The belief in a fundamental separation from others and nature is, in fact, a source of collective trauma in Western societies. Trauma is not only the result of war and oppression from outside the group; it also comes from upbringing and surroundings as we learn to see ourselves as separate from others and nature rather than as intimately related. We thereby unconsciously contribute to the loss of community and to the destruction of the ecological balance, a societal trend that leads to further trauma at the individual level and the continuation of the cycle. The principles at the spiritual core of the world religions can help show people a way out of this dismal fate.
As Thomas Hubl explains, we need to “bridge the wisdom gap between our world’s ancient spiritual traditions and the current understanding afforded by science.” In his view, we are at the edge of a new era which calls to us to marry science and spirit, soul and scholarship. The challenge of our time is to heal the “soul wound” that we all share so that we can have a bright future. Eastern wisdom has much to offer in this regard.
