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Psychology Can Only Take Us So Far


An interview with Robert Frager
 

Interview

Robert Frager

« Read Wren Bernstein's introduction to the piece

« Read part 1 — interview with Sheikh Ragip

This article first appeared in Issue 17, “What is Ego? Friend or Foe...” Click for more information.

 

What Is Enlightenment: In addition to your role as a Sufi sheikh, you’re also the founding president of a progressive academic institution devoted to transpersonal psychology. You mentioned to me previously that you are in some ways a very different person in your two different roles, and that as a result, you often even contradict yourself. In particular you said that when wearing your Sufi hat you often say terrible things about psychology, your chosen profession. Can you speak a little bit about your experience of the conflict between these two worlds?

Robert Frager: One way of putting the problem is that in using the term “psychology” in an academic setting, in an institution that offers a Ph.D. degree, we’re taking on the whole Western academic tradition with its emphasis on head alone—certainly not heart, much less soul. If you break apart the very term “psychology,” “psyche” means spirit or soul in Greek; and therefore, psychology or psychoanalysis is literally the scientific analysis, the logical cutting up, or parsing, of the soul, which in itself is pretty crazy. How in the hell do you parse the soul? How can you be analytic when it comes to the soul?

When you even use the term “psychology,” you’re buying into something that says logic will do it. But logic is a very limited tool. Certainly, logic has caused me to make a lot of wrong decisions in my life. And in Sufism, as soon as you get to the higher stages, forget logic. It doesn’t figure anymore because you have a paradox; what is that soul in you that’s transcendent? What is before the before? And after the after? These are not questions logic is ever going to handle

So I think psychology can only take one so far. And I think the problem with much of modern science and technology, including psychology, is that it doesn’t know its own limits. Huston Smith, who had the fascinating experience of being a professor of philosophy and religion at the “ Temple of Science,” MIT, wrote beautifully about this. He said there’s the huge night sky, which is this vast array of stars and things that you can’t see with the naked eye. And science is taking one searchlight and illuminating one piece. The problem with science is that it says, “Everything we didn’t illuminate doesn’t count.” So one of the problems with psychology, like much of modern academic science, is that it doesn’t really acknowledge the value of where it doesn’t go—which is to issues of the heart, to issues of ultimate meaning and value, to issues of the spirit.

Now, psychology does some things wonderfully. I’ve often spoken with Muslim psychologists, colleagues who’ve said to me, “As a Muslim, should I even be dealing with Western psychology? Isn’t it a distortion from our point of view as religious men and women?” And generally I’ve said, “Look, notice that the whole clinical field in psychology is really the psychology of the lower levels of the nafs [ego or lower self].” That’s all it is. It’s very valuable. In fact it teaches us some things about the nafs that we wouldn’t know otherwise. The Sufi tradition, for example, doesn’t talk about some of these fascinating defense mechanisms of the psyche—like repression or projection, the things that Freud and Anna Freud and the neo-Freudians laid out. Understanding this is very valuable. But if you think that’s all the psyche is, that’s absurd.

WIE: It seems to be a common view among transpersonal psychologists that before we can truly begin the work of abandoning the ego, it is essential that we first develop a strong ego. Indeed, ever since psychiatrist and meditation teacher Jack Engler first put forth the statement “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody,” this idea has come to be regarded as almost the first commandment of the transpersonal psychological field. I recently read Engler’s statement to the Christian Orthodox elder Archimandrite Dionysios, and he responded, “That’s like saying you have to become the head of the Mafia before you can become president!” What is your view on this?

Frager: They’re both right. I’ve noticed, and I’m sure this is true in Greece, the spiritual traditions in general don’t take children of one year old or even five years old into a monastery. But why don’t the ashrams, the monasteries, take kids in at birth if they really believe that the kids should be surrounded by spiritual beings and by spiritual discipline, instead of being surrounded by the worldly life? It seems to me that one reason is to give them a chance to develop their personalities, develop their likes and dislikes, mature enough so that they come to the monastery with a personality—even though, interestingly, that personality is developed in the world. You have to let them be in the world and develop to a certain extent, because only then do they have a real vocation and can they make a reasonable choice. In other words, they have developed their egos, they have developed their personalities to some extent.

My former teacher Kennett Roshi once put it this way; she said, “If you look at the Buddhist iconography, there’s a picture of Maitreya, the Buddha to come, sitting on a giant beast. He’s larger than the beast—bigger, weightier, stronger. He hasn’t killed the beast but he sat on it, controlled it.” And that beast is the ego. I think that is the goal. The goal is not to kill the ego. It’s not to have no personality, but it’s to sit on it and to be bigger than it is. Now, sitting on it isn’t beating it or starving it. It’s sitting on it. I mean the ego might say, “I’m being abused.” But then who believes it? The goal is to somehow have developed yourself as a spiritual being so that the ego is a small part of you but a developed part.

Now I think Engler’s statement can certainly be misinterpreted to mean: “Well, I have to work just on developing my ego now.” My guess is the best way to do it is you work on developing your ego in the context of sitting on it. You don’t just go, “Let me feed this beast and let it go free and then by the time it’s really grown I’m going to have a hell of a time taming it.” That’s pretty dumb! What you do is feed and love the beast, but you train it as you’re nourishing it with love, with understanding.

WIE: So you’re saying that whatever aspects of self need to be developed to grow spiritually can all be developed in the context of spiritual pursuit?

Frager: Yes. I think developing ego out of the context of spirituality, where it’s just pandering to the ego, is a foolish mistake.

WIE: You’ve been speaking about ego in a number of different ways. One thing we’ve observed in the course of our research for this issue is that “ego” is a word that has traditionally been used differently by psychological theorists than it has been by the spiritual traditions. Whereas spiritual traditions have tended to use the word “ego” to refer to the enemy of the path, the compulsion to maintain and preserve at all costs our separate sense of self, our identity, Western psychology generally refers to it in positive terms as either our personality or as a set of capacities or functions that we need to live effectively in the world. Yet transpersonal psychology, in its attempt to bring psychology and spirituality together, often seems to blur this distinction by referring to the ego at times as an obstacle that needs to be transcended and at other times as simply the personality. Isn’t it essential, however, if we really want to be victorious in our quest for liberation that we know exactly what the obstacle we must face really is, and that we keep a stark vision of the negative ego—the enemy of the path—firmly in our sights?

Frager: Well let me seem to not answer this. I think, from a Sufi perspective, one very important component of the struggle to develop oneself spiritually is service—service to humanity but also service to the world, to all of creation. One of the great tools to do that is the personality structure, including the ego, the sense of self. Now even as you’re working to divest yourself of that separate sense of self, which is the last stage, in order to get there, paradoxically, you need to use that self well. It is the beast on which the Buddha rides. If you look at the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, when you go through the experience of nirvana, you go through the experience of union and dropping all separateness. But you come back to serve. In the classic ten ox-herding pictures, the last image is returning to the world with “bliss-bestowing hands”—which means with your personality structure. But the difference is that your personality is firmly under your control. It’s a tool that you use. It’s not the master.



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This article is from
Our 15th Anniversary Issue

 

September–December 2006

 
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