Contemporary psychological research on ‘flow experience’ (engaged,
unselfconscious activity that eliminates the experience of a separate self) gives some
interesting scientific evidence of the First Noble Truth. After years of researching the
character of flow experience in everyday life, the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi (1993)
says,
when attention is not occupied by a specific task, like a job or a conversation,
thoughts begin to wander in random circles. But in this case ‘random’ does not
mean that there is an equal chance of having happy and sad thoughts. [T]he
majority of thoughts that come to the mind when we are not concentrating are
likely to be depressing.
(1993:35)This human hyper-alertness to negativity, as described in the research of
Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues, appears to have promoted a desire for constant
‘improvement’ that may have been beneficial to our species in some aspects in our
early adaptation in that we were able to spread over many kinds of landscapes and
conditions, quickly overtaking many other species. But this widespread human
dominance of the planet has now created a threat to our survival as we are exhausting
the environmental resources we need for our own life supports.
How therapy transforms dukkha and awakens compassionMuch of our suffering originates with our sense of separateness and fear, through our
evaluations of ourselves and others. Our psychological complexes, ego and otherwise,
form our basic habits of mind that develop first in our early relationships, eventually
becoming the trigger points or reactive cues for our personal emotional patterns of
reaction and defense. These complexes are major aspects of what Buddhism calls
karma: consequences of our conscious and unconscious intentions expressed through
our actions. As Buddhist scholar Dharmasiri (1989) has said,
Although a bad thought may seem to disappear...it does not completely
disappear but goes...to the unconscious and starts forming a complex around
the original nucleus...[T]he complex becomes charged with more and more
power as it grows bigger...This is the maturation of karma. When the complex
is fully matured, at some point it explodes into the fruition of karma.
(1989:37)Such complexes, derived from universal emotional conditions of being human, are
driving forces in generating and re-generating images of self and others, through
distortions and delusions of fear and desire, dominance and submission, and power
and weakness. From a Jungian perspective, psychological complexes develop
universally through archetypes or innate predispositions. Archetypes are innate
tendencies in humans to form coherent emotionally charged images in states of
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