Some people may feel that by going on at such length, I am trying to upstage the Master. If so, however, they are approaching this commentary in the wrong spirit. Commentaries on the Old and New Testament, the Yoga and Buddhist sutras, with which Laing was intimately familiar, often go on for pages about a single line of text. Such commentaries imply that the text is worthy of sustained reflection, not something to be read and passed over in a hurry. Does that mean that I approach Laing’s words as if they were “holy writ?” No, indeed. Like the spiritual traditions in which he was so deeply versed, Laing was full of contradictions, and bringing those contradictions to light is a perfectly legitimate and respectful undertaking if we use the awareness of them to reflect with greater depth and clarity on the issues at hand, rather than making them the basis for a hostile deconstruction of his work. I hope that this free flowing meditation on Laing’s interview with Feuerstein will help to consolidate Laing’s hold on posterity, and demonstrate his continuing relevance to spiritual seekers in our time. Let us begin with the interview itself.

While the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing has gained worldwide professional renown for his work with schizophrenia, he has also won popular regard for his vehement social criticism. He contends that society, in general, is founded on denial of self and experience, rather than the discovery of reality in its fullness and wholeness. He has strongly objected to the modern trend toward depersonalization, especially as it appears in psychiatry in the guise of scientific objectivism.

[This article originally appeared in The Laughing Man magazine, vol. 5, #12, pp. 19-21. It is used by permission of The Dawn Horse Press. All rights reserved.]

Before we comment on the interview itself, it may be helpful to know the following. A year or so before his death in August 1989, R.D. Laing was living quietly in Going, Austria, when he confided the following dream to his friend and follower, Theodor Itten. He dreamt he was “in” a soccer match, but that he was “both sides.” In other words, he did not identify with any individual player or team member, i.e. a captain or a goalkeeper. Nor did he adopt a corporate identity, becoming one team as opposed to the other. Instead, his description conveys the impression that in some sense he was everybody, on both sides, if not implicated in the action, the game itself (i.e. the offensive and defensive maneuvers from both sides of the field).

Unfortunately, Laing said no more about this intriguing oneiric interlude. Beyond identifying it as a football (soccer) match, he did not describe the visual palette of the dream, nor report on the affect that accompanied it. Finally, he left no “free associations” by means of which we could interpret it, nor resolve the questions it begs—“If you are both sides, then the whole notion of winning becomes moot, doesn’t it? If you are both sides, then no one wins or everyone wins—correct?”

Even in the absence of such information, however, several interpretations are possible. As I pointed out in The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing, books like Sanity, Madness and the Family, The Politics of Experience and The Politics of The Family were filled with scathing critiques of the nuclear family, giving rise to the widespread impression that Laing was basically opposed to the family. Nevertheless, beginning in 1972, Laing, denounced revolutionaries who neglected their wives and children in the interests of building “the revolution”, and defended the family against the growing tide of counter-cultural and ideologically inflected contempt for family life, baffling and antagonizing many former friends and supporters in the process.

A similar reversal took place with respect to his stance on psychiatric drugs. Laing’s first book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, was a sustained attempt to make the process of going mad “intelligible” to ordinary, educated people. It was mercifully free of the jargon of mainstream psychiatry, psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the dominant approaches in the mental health field at the time, because Laing felt that reliance on such language gets in the way of understanding patients as suffering human beings, rather than deepening our understanding of them. As the sixties unfolded, Laing’s broadened his critique of mainstream psychiatry well beyond its theoretical models, to include various involuntary “treatments”, like drugs and electroshock, and became so vehement that he was often accused of being an “anti-psychiatrist”–a label he always rejected, by the way. But toward the middle and end of the eighties, Laing’s stance, though still critical, became more conciliatory, and he reached out again to many old psychiatric colleagues in an effort to engage them in dialogue. Perhaps inevitably, as he did this with increasing frequency, certain inconsistencies between his earlier and later positions came to light, disconcerting some of his followers from previous decades, who wondered where he really stood on the issues, and why he no longer opposed the (voluntary) use of psychotropic medication, provided patients were fully informed of the risks entailed in this approach to treatment.

Thomas Szasz, whose reputation as “the gadfly of psychiatry” during the 1960’s was gradually eclipsed by Laing’s, remained remarkably consistent in all his basic positions as the decades unfolded, and would no doubt interpret Laing’s dream as an endopsychic perception–or a spontaneous symbolic self-representation—of Laing’s muddle-headedness and opportunism, of his tendency to embrace or espouse both sides of an issue; in other words, to equivocate, or to revel in ambiguity when it suited his purposes. After all, by Szasz’s account, Laing is everywhere–and nowhere–and does not have to commit himself to a position or to “take a side”. While Szasz’s appraisal of Laing is exceedingly harsh, any reasonably alert person can find some evidence of this tendency in his writings and public pronouncements. Consistency was not his strong suit.

A Freudian might say that Laing’s dream represents the fulfillment of a childhood wish – perhaps the desire to see two adversarial parents (and their respective families) reconciled; a wish that is eminently understandable, once you delve into Laing’s family history. Alternatively, for a Freudian, it might represent Laing’s wish to finally overcome his own intensely competitive nature. After all, whatever else he was, Laing was nothing if not competitive. A few months after he reported this dream, he died on a tennis court, playing vigorously against Robert Firestone, a much younger man, in 105 degree heat — and beating him soundly, too! Several months before the dream in question, Laing told Theo Itten that he was engaged in planning an international “Olympics of the mind.” Sadly, nothing came of it, although Laing invested considerable energy in this project. The point here, however, is that the “Olympics” metaphor implies that someone who achieved international stature in the fields of philosophy, science, etc., must have undergone rigorous training and expect to meet his or her peers in a competitive arena.

Unlike Freudians, who focus on early childhood experiences and internal conflicts, Jungians examine the dreams of middle-aged and elderly people looking for evidence of personal integration as the maturing psyche prepares for eventual death. That being so, a Jungian would probably say that the overt lack of an egoic identification and the rejection of any corporate identity suggest that this dream is really about the process of individuation , one in which the self becomes integrated through a conjunctio oppositorum , which, in Laing’s case, is represented idiosyncratically through the interplay of two opposing (male) teams, rather than the more conventional archetypal symbolism of male/female intercourse.

Which interpretation is correct? Perhaps all—or none! People who have studied Laing’s life and thought in depth will be hard pressed to embrace or repudiate any single interpretation unreservedly, because they all fit certain aspects of his protean personality. But by the same token, none of them really do him justice, or capture all the facets of his mercurial temperament, his fierce competitiveness, his subtle and sophisticated mind, and, finally, his desire to transcend his internal conflicts, including the conflicts between individualism and collectivism, competition and co-operation that the dream fragment he shared with Itten probably calls attention to. Quite apart from any interpretation we may offer, the dream itself does not do Laing justice, because while it sheds light on his internal conflicts, it does not adequately reflect either his loving or truth-loving dispositions, both of which were deeply embedded in his psyche, and as much a part of his personal Gestalt as his other traits and vulnerabilities.

By contrast, thankfully, “Sparks of Light” reflects Laing at his best, and contains many of his most profound reflections on spirituality and love. But as the editor of the interview points out in the preamble, this is not what his readers had come to expect, nor was it delivered in his usual style. Had Laing quoted a Vedanta sage, a Buddhist preceptor or William Blake, no one would have blinked an eye. But the surprise—indeed, astonishment –that most readers felt when Laing gave voice to an explicitly Christian religious sensibility calls for explanation, and the dream of the soccer match is really very illuminating in this regard.

Readers of The Wing of Madness already know that Laing’s life and character were a study in contrasts. Depending on circumstances, and his frame of mind at the time, Laing could be disciplined or debauched, cruel or kind, courteous or rude, aristocratic or a man of the people. He also oscillated, at various times, between extremes of optimism and pessimism, diffidence (or reticence) and lurid exhibitionism, leading many people to conclude—quite mistakenly—that Laing was merely manic depressive, or “bi-polar.” Bi-polar? Not on your life, though the term “polypolar”, which I just invented for the occasion, would furnish a fair description of his complex personality. While I do not deny the existence of bi-polar disorder, nor underestimate the damage it can do, the term “bipolar” has become too popular, too diffuse and too clichéd in psychiatric discourse and contemporary culture. Besides, the effort to reduce the various contradictions in Laing’s life and work to the manifold expressions of a single (biological) substrate betrays a deeply impoverished (and/or overly inclusive) view of creative and unconventional people, and the role which tensions and polarities (of various kinds) play in potentiating creative intellectual and spiritual work.

In any case, if you survey his life as a whole you will find that at various times, and in various ways, Laing straddled the boundaries between psychiatrists and mental patients, between radicals and conservatives, and between modern and postmodern epistemologies. But he also straddled the often adversarial boundaries between theists and atheists, mystics and scientists—a fact that is reflected in the disparate appraisals one gleans from his intimate friends an co-workers.  Some of his oldest and closest friends, including his adolescent chum John Duffy, whom I met in Glasgow in 1992, knew Laing only as an outspoken atheist—a man of the Left who was smitten with Sartre, and had nothing but contempt for pious souls and their self-deluding notions. Duffy, who met Laing at age 16, dismissed his religious utterances in later life as being a kind of poetry at best, hinting obliquely that Laing’s lapses into religious rhetoric might have been opportunistic or insincere, or possibly expressions of a passing weakness.

Sydney Briskin, a social worker who helped found the Philadelphia Association, and who personally helped to negotiate the lease of the famous (and infamous) Kingsley Hall, saw Laing precisely the same way as Duffy–as an atheist, and a man of the Left. Briskin was stunned when Laing used the public auditorium at Kingsley Hall in the Fall of 1964 to deliver a thundering sermon in the old Calvinist style –and without a trace of irony, either. During the late 1970’s , having long since left Kingsley Hall, Laing occasionally delivered sermons in his neighborhood Church, usually with great vigor and conviction.

How to explain this seeming anomaly? Well, first let us note that Laing’s interests and activities in the Christian sphere were not known to the majority of his readers, and that Laing himself acknowledges the comparative oddity of his religious musings by admitting that he was finally expressing himself in a Christian idiom that he had become “. . . less embarrassed about affirming in the course of the last thirty years or so.”

Why embarrassed? Well, to give Laing the benefit of the doubt, it is true that during the Cold War era, when Laing rose to prominence, people tended to regard anyone who spoke often and earnestly of their faith outside of their immediate circle as being somewhat odd and ill-educated. That is no longer the case, at least in the USA. However, whatever prevailing attitudes were at the time, the fact remains that this statement also conveys the misleading impressions that though his reluctance to speak about it had diminished in the last few decades, for reasons that are not given, his faith had been constant throughout. This is simply not so, and is belied by many other things he said, both before and after this interview was given. Indeed, reviewing all his pronouncements on spiritual and theological questions over he years, the cumulative impression one gets is that he spent most of his adolescence and adult life as a reluctant and sometimes deeply anguished agnostic who longed for the consolations of faith, but could not overcome his doubts and misgivings sufficiently to affirm what he desired, sometimes ambivalently, sometimes whole-heartedly. This is probably the real source of his “embarrassment.”

What kind of Christian was Laing when he was not overwhelmed by doubt? Before answering that question, it is instructive to note that as a teenager, Laing was exposed to two different kinds of Christianity–the Evangelical-cum-fundamentalist variety of Calvinism, and the older “Celtic Christianity” that arrived in Scotland with Brendan the Navigator (484-578 C.E.) and St. Columba (521-597 C.E.), both of whom had a role in the building of Iona Abbey on the Isle Iona, in the Lower Hebrides.  By the age of 14, Laing claimed, he had emphatically rejected the former, Evangelical form of Christianity in favor of the latter, Celtic variety, at least for a time. This claim is born out by his on again/off again relationship with the Very Reverend George MacLeod (1895-1991 C.E.), who like Laing, incidentally, was a native of Glasgow who rose to the rank of Captain in the British Army. McLeod was the founder of The Iona Christian Community, which is an ecumenical Christian community based on the Isle of Iona in the Lower Hebrides and dedicated to the preservation of Celtic Christianity and the erasure of world hunger and poverty. Though few people outside of Scotland are aware of it, Laing spent many days there over the course of his career. Indeed, in the early 1980’s, Laing pondered the possibility of situating a foundation to be called St. Oran’s Trust on this fair island.

Laing’s embrace of Celtic Christianity is also evidenced his insistence in his remark that we are all one in the Universal Fire. Indeed, he says, our individual souls are nothing but “sparks” emanating from this universal fire. Classicists contend that the idea that the soul is a “spark” of a Divine Fire probably originates in the Orphic religion, but gets taken up by Plato in the 4th century B.C.E., and subsequently, by the Stoics and neo-Platonists in the Hellenistic-Roman era. While originally a school of pagan philosophy, Neo-Platonism and the emanationist approach to theology later took on Jewish, Christian and Islamic forms, and, as we survey the history of Western spirituality, we find the imagery of the soul as a Divine spark as a common idiom for mystics of all three traditions.

Another striking feature of his talk with Feuerstein, is that when asked to share the fruits of a lifetime of introspection, Laing responded that he discovered “that hope is justifiable.” The term “hope” does not surface often in Laing’s work, and though he vigorously repudiated the suggestion, many reader—friends and critics alike—found The Politics of Experience to be an angry and eloquent expression of overwhelming despair. If so, of course, Laing had clearly recovered some of his optimism in the interim. Meanwhile, the suggestion that hope is justifiable, and that this represents a hard won discovery on his part, says a great deal about him personally.

That being so, it is also instructive to note that Laing tries here—and not for the first time—to link the idea of love to the project of scientific inquiry. Laing often despaired of getting psychiatrists to see that viewing their patients primarily or exclusively through the lenses of the natural scientific attitude is profoundly dehumanizing. The idea that science is (or ought) to be informed by a loving, reverential attitude toward nature was self-evident to someone like Einstein, but is odd and incongruous to most scientists, so Laing justified this linkage by pointing to the destructive potential of scientific research that lacks this basis. He said:

If you investigate and inquire into the world without love, you don’t find anything worthwhile. If you look at a tree or a frog or anything at all without the eyes of love, then you obtain only loveless, heartless knowledge. When such knowledge is accumulated and applied to practices of scientific technology, it becomes the most destructive form of knowledge ever discovered. Even the worst black magic cannot vie with the
destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what it looks at in order to discover its elements.

Though Laing’s readers often found these remarks strikingly original, the fact remains that they are a close paraphrase of ideas expressed by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in the 1930’s. Laing was introduced to Buber’s critique of scientism by his mentor, neurologist Joseph Schorstein in 1949. But Laing was evidently determined to co-ordinate Buber’s critique of loveless science into a specifically Christian message, which emphasizes the centrality of prayer and service. Admittedly, these are also Jewish values, and Buber also anticipates the reservations Laing expressed about certain features of mystical theology. Laing said here, for example, that

I don’t like to go so far as to talk of actual union with God or becoming God. Such expressions tend to encourage Man’s vanity and spiritual ambitions. You find people saying, “What’s the point of being a bank manager if, through meditation techniques, you can become God in less time than it takes to get through business school?” I would much rather speak of being a slave of God, in whose service is perfect freedom.

Jews and Christians both stress God’s transcendence. But where Buber (and Jews generally) differ from Laing (and most Christians) is in the use of the idiom of slavery. Jews speak of being God’s servant, or alternatively, his willing and active collaborator in the work of Tikkun Olam—the repair or restoration of the world through acts of love and justice. The eventual consummation of this holy mission (in the Messianic time) is often depicted by Jewish mystics as the eventual return of the Holy Sparks to the Primordial Fire. But in the meantime, from the Jewish perspective, God liberated the Jews from slavery in Egypt precisely in order to serve him, and permitted a whole generation of former slaves to perish in the wilderness because the slave mentality is inimical to the worship of God. Service to the Lord is essentially the act of a free man or woman, so the notion of being “a slave of God” is somewhat incongruous to the Jewish mind. The Hebrew Bible (and accompanying commentaries) leave no room for doubt on this score. God does not want slaves, whose work is—by definition—coerced. Besides, even the most intimate I-Thou relationship does not preclude conflict, and Jacob famously wrestles with the angel, refusing to surrender, before finally being accepted by God and embracing his personal destiny. He was thenceforth known as Israel, which means “he wrestled with God”—which is evidently what Laing did for much of his adult life.

Having said that, however, Laing’s reluctance to speak of “becoming God” prompts us to reflect that in Western religious traditions, the condition of religious (and of interpersonal) communion in love—or indeed of any kind of genuine intimacy—is the inexorable separateness and singularity of selves; a theme that Laing broached in existential and phenomenological terms many times. In Self and Others, for example, Laing spoke with great eloquence about the sense of unqualified privacy and the incommensurability of one’s personal being that accompanies the experience of one’s being-for-oneself, citing the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to underscore his point. In The Politics of Experience, Laing continued in this vein by emphasizing that although people experience one another as experiencing the world or themselves in certain ways, no one has direct access to the experience of another person. Conversely, he maintained my self is my experience, and my experience, in the final analysis, is myself.

George Feuerstein was alert to the apparent paradox of discussing certain kinds of mystical experiences and practices from the standpoint of the separateness and singularity of the self, and raised the issue indirectly as follows:

FEUERSTEIN: But experience presupposes an experiencing subject, or the ego. Therefore, no experience can be truly transcendental, since the ego is still in place. What is your view on that?

Significantly, Laing replied:

LAING: I don’t think that such a thing as the ego exists. The ego is a cultural hallucination. The “ego” is a name for a coherent set of mental operations that enable us to function in our society. We draw a circle around those operations and think it is a thing with which to identify ourselves. We must disidentify ourselves from the ego and see it as a process, a systematic, reasonably coherent set of operations. What we call our ego we know to be always changing, impermanent, transient, but still we persist in this hallucination. The transcendental perspective is both immanent and transcendental. So one must simultaneously get into oneself and out of one’s ego. It is a return to ordinariness, as in the ox-herding cycle of Japanese Zen Buddhism. A mountain finally becomes a mountain again, a tree a tree, a river a river.

Laing’s words here are quite illuminating. Whereas Feuerstein equates the experiencing subject with the “ego”, as many philosophers do, Laing speaks of “disidentifying ourselves” from the ego, which implies that ultimately we have—or more precisely, that we are –selves that are separate from our egos. Similarly, he speaks of the need to “get into oneself and out of one’s ego”, implying that the less self-estranged we are, the less caught up we are in “cultural hallucinations.” And though he does not say so in quite so many words, it follows from this that the self and the ego are not two different terms for the same entity, as many of us imagine, but fundamentally different entities, the ego being a “cultural hallucination”, the self being our authentic ground of experience.

In stressing the difference between the self and the ego, Laing was joining with a small but important group of psychoanalytic thinkers for whom the distinction between the self and the ego is pivotal to understanding transcendental and psychotherapeutic experience - C.G. Jung, D.W. Winnicott, E.Graham Howe, and oddly enough, Erik Erikson, who is still widely misinterpreted as an “ego psychologist.” In this sense, perhaps, Laing and Feuerstein were on different wavelengths and talking past one another, since Feuerstein seemed to assume that the ego and the self are synonyms through out this brief exchange.

The interview between Laing and Feuerstein ended on an odd note, too. Feuerstein inquired whether, or to what extent, Laing’s personal contact with “holy men” had motivated him to surrender himself completely to a spiritual teacher or guru. Laing responded by saying that

LAING: I have associated with a number of holy men. It is impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like without meeting and spending quite a lot of time in the company of such people. But I have never felt any inner impulsion to surrender myself to a guru. However, if some people feel they need to do that, then I think it is perfectly appropriate for them to do so. A genuine spiritual master would not be able to exploit that for his own egoic advantage. It has been said that if you go to a guru with a pure heart, that purity of heart will protect you, even if the guru turns out to be an impostor. It will do the guru harm, not the disciple.
FEUERSTEIN: Do you feel there are people around now who actually have Realized God and are empowered to lead other people to the same Realization?
LAING: I have not personally met any such one. I have met a number of people I would regard as servants of God.
FEUERSTEIN: You are saying you have not actually met somebody whom you felt was God-Realized. Is that, perhaps, the reason you did not have that impulsion to surrender to a guru? If you had met Jesus, would you have followed him? As he said, “Follow me.”
LAING: (pause) I hope so. Yes, definitely.
FEUERSTEIN: That is an honest answer.

What neither Laing nor Feuerstein stated, at this point, is that from a Christian perspective, Jesus was not just some “God Realized” holy man, or a particularly potent and charismatic guru, but God incarnate. But by the same token, surrendering to God is entirely in keeping with the Christian ethos, so Laing could not possibly have answered “no” to this question without nullifying everything he said prior to that point in this same interview. Meanwhile, without actually saying so, Feuerstein himself appeared to be hinting that Jesus was merely a supremely gifted “spiritual master”—a stark difference in perspective they politely agreed not to broach here. So the real point of this exchange, perhaps, is that while dancing around this controversial issue, Laing was politely expressing some reservations about the potential pitfalls of personal charisma among gurus of one sort and another, hinting at the potential dangers of egoism and exploitation (on the part of the guru) and eventual disappointment (on the part of his followers.)

Nevertheless, Laing and Feuerstein were on exactly the same wavelength when it came to decrying the dangers of scientism and materialism in contemporary culture. In this context, Feuerstein extracted a rather stark and startling statement of faith from Laing, as follows.

LAING:. . . the material world is contained within the world of the Spirit, which has final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times. I don’t think anything happens to materials except what Spirit allows.

This statement can be interpreted in various ways—theologically, philosophically and metaphysically. At the very least, it represents a clear and resounding repudiation of the materialist interpretation of history and of human affairs that many of Laing’s erstwhile friends and followers continued to cling to. But a statement like this also lends itself to a psychological interpretation. Among other things, perhaps, Laing’s emphasis on the Spirit’s “final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times” is an expression of resurgent optimism, and a vivid expression of what Erikson called basic trust—an affirmation of the basic goodness and trustworthiness of the cosmos, in spite of the manifold horrors and privations we undergo individually at the “material” level. Statements of this kind do not always have this meaning, of course. Depending on circumstances, the statement that everything that happens is allowed by the Spirit - presumably in the service of our ultimate redemption—can be plausibly construed as a call for resignation, indifference or complacency in the face of (possibly preventable, and certainly horrific) events. Ever since the Holocaust, for example, Jews, and increasing numbers of Christians, wonder how God could have let this catastrophe happen, and point out that saying it happened with God’s full knowledge and consent are making God complicit in unspeakable depravity. Similarly, saying that hurricane Katrina was “permitted” by God because of the sinfulness of New Orleans’ residents—a la televangelist Pat Robertson—is a travesty of what Laing was trying to say. So, however people are tempted to interpret this statement of on a philosophical or spiritual plane, experience compels the conclusion that, odd as it sounds, a statement of faith like this can be an affirmation of faith, a technique for blaming (and perhaps vilifying) the victim, or a thinly disguised wish fulfillment fantasy that covers up an underlying hostility or intolerance.

Having said that, it is clear from context that Laing was not calling for resignation, indifference or complacency in the face of evil, because he begins his remarks with the observation “that hope is justifiable,” and goes on to emphasize the importance of love, prayer and service. And though Laing would have rued the comparison, given his distaste for American “ego psychology”, his musings on this point are entirely in keeping with Erikson’s claim that hope is the virtue characteristic of “basic trust”. As Erikson often pointed out, hope is the foundation of all other “virtues.” Sociability, self-esteem and self-discipline seldom flourish in a climate of pervasive mistrust, which distort human development and human relationships in myriad ways. And though he couched them in the language of existential phenomenology, Laing addressed similar kinds of issues when he talked about ontological security and insecurity and the schizoid patient’s fear of authentic self-disclosure in The Divided Self.

That being so, it is important to point out that Laing’s childhood was fraught with experiences that provoked a profound sense of mistrust, especially in relation to his mother. As a result, perhaps, in adult life, he was seldom as certain of the presence of some sort of Providence or Divine oversight at work in the course of unfolding events as he appears to be here. Had his childhood been less harrowing, and his adult life less fraught with conflict, controversy and the blandishments of fame, Laing might have been able to cultivate a steadier, more consistent faith, and would probably have lived a longer, more temperate and more fulfilling life as a consequence. But by the same token, if he had done those things, he might never have had those remarkable insights into the minds of the mad that riveted the world’s attention on him for a brief but memorable span of time.

Daniel Burston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology who holds doctorates in Psychology (1989) and in Social and Political Thought (1985) from York University in Toronto. He is also an Associate of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and on the Advisory Board of the C. G. Jung Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh, the Advisory Board of Janus Head, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis. His books have been reviewed in numerous journals and newspapers, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, The New Statesman, and many other magazines.

He is the author of The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D.Laing, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy, and Psychotherapy as a Human Science. Dr. Burston’s most recent book is Erik Erikson and the American Psyche: Ego, Ethics and Evolution.

However, like many attempts to expose Western people to the core doctrines of Eastern mysticism, “The Sacred Mirror” offers an interpretation of their nondual teachings that highly transforms their original meaning, compounding the difficulty. What makes nondualism so troublesome is that it runs counter to our usual intuitions of reality.  Fundamentally, the problem Westerners have with nondualism is twofold: (1) its core contention that there no absolute separation between one person and another; and, (2) its controversial implication that there is no fundamental difference between the true self of the individual and the Ultimate Self or God. (Obviously, the Absolute of nondualism—whether it be described as Consciousness, Self, Void, or even “God"—is of an entirely different order than the Deity of the Semitic religions.)

“The Sacred Mirror” aims to explore the implications of nondualism for the practice of psychotherapy. It is an extremely difficult task, especially in Western culture. Where it is entertained at all, the notion that there is no ultimate separation between self and other is sometimes thought of as too abstract and even alien an idea to be useful in clinical practice. And the idea that human beings might, in their very nature, actually be divine is anathema to prevailing Western sensibilities. However, this is core contention and controversial implication of nondualism. Futher, perhaps surprisingly, nondual points of view can be found in Western mysticism. For example, a famous medieval Christian monk, Meister Eckhart, exhorted spiritual aspirants to his own highest intuition: “I discover that I and God are one.” But Meister Eckhart was severely chastised by the Holy Roman Church for his “heretical” views. Other nondual mystics have fared worse. Some have faced forced ritual “purification”, torture, or, as in the examples of Giordano Bruno and Mansour al-Hallaj, even death. Clearly, identifying the very Self of human beings with God (however conceived) is an extremely controversial claim. This is why nondualism has been kept something of a secret within Western spiritual traditions, if not held to be a pure heresy. As David Loy puts it in his excellent book on the subject, “Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy”: “[In the West,] claims about subject-object nonduality, like the broad mystical tradition where they have found their most comfortable home, have survived as a puzzling subterranean undercurrent . . . a seed which, however often sown, has never found fertile soil . . .”

Nevertheless, the notion that our usual presumption that the ego-self and its every other can and should be transcended is seriously entertained by the contributors to Prendergast, Fenner, and Krystal’s daring attempt to introduce therapists to the potentially auspicious benefits of nondualism. In their introduction they tell us that all of the chapters were written for this volume by authors with first-hand familiarity with nondual awareness. In addition, many of them know each other and have participated in a living synergy through various contacts, including the presentation of their work at an annual conference, called “Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy”. The authors, who are either seasoned clinicians or established spiritual teachers, are quick to point out that this volume is neither synoptic nor gospel, but an exploration in progress, one that the reader is emphatically invited to join.

The nascent flowering of nondual wisdom now underway in the West is thought to represent new challenges and opportunities for the field of psychotherapy. Indeed, the authors suggest we are witnessing the emergence of an entirely new genre of psychotherapy. Prendergast makes this striking observation about the significance of this new genre: “Awakening nondual awareness adds a depth dimension to any of the existing schools of psychology, regardless of their orientation . . .. It is not so much that therapists integrate Being, as they are absorbed by it. As they more deeply attune with and embody the ground of Being, Presence is enhanced.” The author’s define “Presence” as “Being aware of Itself, whereby one’s ordinary sense of self and reality are literally nothing more than a dream from which we can potentially awaken. In fact, even while dreaming it is possible to be cognizant and thereby engage in lucid dreaming, the first stirring of nondual awareness.”

Clearly, the authors have chosen a formidable task: take the unusual mystical doctrine of nondualism and make it user-friendly for clinical service providers. To do so, the various chapters provide specific clinical techniques, or “skillful means”, whereby the clinician might effectively intervene with the client, enlisting the aid of traditional nondual practices. Peter Fenner suggests in his chapter, “Nonduality and Therapy: Awakening the Unconditioned Mind,” that the fundamental clinical goal of nondual psychotherapy is to awaken clients to their own true nature, which is thought to be the source of healing power. In fact, the unconditioned mind is said to be beyond suffering and ailment, literally, the very state in which healing occurs. We come to know our inherent nature through a letting-go or pruning process, similar to the idea of postmodern and phenomenological approaches to therapy. This approach is one with which Stephan Bodian explicitly concurs in his chapter, “Deconstructing the Self: The Uses of Inquiry in Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice.”
{pagebreak}
A basic premise of the book is that a client’s essential, nondual nature can be reflected back to him or her by the therapist, hence the metaphor of the mirror in the title of the book, as well as in Prendergast’s own chapter, “The Sacred Mirror: Being Together.” Sheila Krystal elaborates on this idea in her chapter, “A Nondual Approach to EMDR: Psychotherapy as Satsang,” referring to nondual therapy as the process in which “the Self meets itself in the sacred mirror of satsang.” She defines satsang as the “coming together in the company of God (as lovers of the truth) . . .”; which is to say, being in a loving relationship with God. Consequently, “The Sacred Mirror” is unusual as a clinical text, for it is willing to include God as a significant agent in the healing process—although most chapters remain tentative in this regard, preferring theistically neutral accounts of nondualism. Indeed, apparently because of its lack of reference to an explicit divinity, Buddhist nondualism dominates in “The Sacred Mirror”. With this approach, any potential controversy over the appearance of God in psychotherapy can be more readily side-stepped.

Time and again in my own clinical work, I have seen the benevolent effects of a spiritual communion that acknowledges and respects nonduality as its ultimate truth. To put it simply, love is the healing principle. Only in overcoming the divisive act of separation between people does love actually emerge into this difficult world. Nondual therapy can be understood as the intention of relinquishing one’s sense of being a separate self, allowing the living presence of love to embrace and pervade both client and clinician, replacing the sense of separation from which they each otherwise suffer. As this living presence informs their relationship, the wisdom of love inherent to each one’s own deepest being comes to the fore. In this way clinical practice becomes most auspicious for the client.

However, in therapy it is easy to confuse the experience of heightened human intimacy with that of the nondual reality. That being so, it is fair to ask whether the authors have succeeded in their efforts to establish nondualism as a viable base for clinical practice. It seems to me that in their attempt to make this most difficult material accessible to a contemporary clinical audience, they have fudged a little. Prendergast, for example, describes the transformations wrought in the client by nondual psychotherapy like this: “In time and without any conscious effort or intent we become like stained glass, more adequate forms for the transmission of light. Our individuality is liberated and enhanced as we knowingly share this common ground with all beings.” It seems misleading to speak in terms of liberating or enhancing one’s individuality, for egoic individuality is precisely what is transcended in nondualism. Likewise, becoming stained glass (which, almost by definition, is multicolored and therefore suggests form or defination) is a questionable metaphor. The realization of the nondual state is better understood as the realization of the very Light Itself.

The literal translation of the Sanskrit term advaita, from the initial Indian spiritual tradition of nondualism, is not-two, more commonly referred to simply as Oneness.  However, there are two very different types of Oneness found in spiritual literature: (1) holism, in which we are connected to or intimately a part of some larger spiritual reality, while retaining our distinct identity; and, (2) nondualism, in which are sense of being a separate self disappears completely and we realize that we literally are this larger reality. Overall, “The Sacred Mirror” favors the former over the latter. In doing so, it would appear that “The Sacred Mirror” is not so much offering an innovation of psychotherapy, as merely elaborating on psychotherapy that is already taking place.

Humanistic and existential psychotherapies advocate holism, not nondualism. They speak of treating the “whole person”. Transpersonal psychotherapies also generally align with holism, although they expand the term’s reference to include spiritual dimensions. Stanley Krippner offers a particularly compelling definition of this latter sense: “[A]n individual’s sense of identity appears to extend beyond its ordinary limits to encompass wider, broader, or deeper aspects of life or the cosmos—including divine elements of creation.” Abraham Maslow tends to speak in terms of “peak experiences”, in which one’s awareness of reality is suddenly heightened to include ecstatic and perhaps even mystical states. Likewise, Carl Rogers feels that life has the potential for transcendental intuitions that increase our capacity for healing. He describes moments in therapy in which “my presence is releasing and helpful to the other . . .. [I]t seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and becomes a part of something larger.”

These are the kinds of experiences described in Prendergast, Fenner, and Krystal’s book. Although their work may add to the techniques of psychotherapy, all this stops short of authentic nondual states, however much the authors advocate their innovations as manifestations of nondual wisdom. In reality, what they are describing seems more akin to the temporary states—heightened well-being, feelings of intimate relatedness, or even, on occasion, mystical absorption—that most spiritual traditions have long regarded as well short of nondual Enlightenment.

Unfortunately, “The Sacred Mirror” never clearly differentiates the valid but non-ultimate experiences of associated with holism from the more profound nondual intuition of our native egolessness. Theirs is an understandable mistake, for nondualism in no way excludes the experiences characteristic of holism. As Prendergast puts it: “While essentially without qualities, [nondual reality is] commonly experienced as being vast, free, spacious, heartfelt, and present-centered. Many people report feeling a subtle joy, love, compassion, peace, gratitude, and sense of connectedness with all of life when they directly attune with it.” Clearly, these attributes resonate with the most ordinary and common goals of clinical practice.

One way to resolve the ambiguity between holism and nondualism is by contemplating a familiar experience: the sense of us. It is precisely the sense of us that is emphasized throughout “The Sacred Mirror”. For example, John Welwood’s chapter, “Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience,” even pays homage to Martin Buber’s vision of the I-Thou relationship: “The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.” This orientation to intimacy understands the human psyche in the manner of holism, in which you and I maintain our individuality but relax into a kind of communion with one another, a sense that we form a greater or larger whole. We become an us. In nondual realization, however, “you and I” drop out altogether. To the nondual realizer you literally are me. From this point of view, holism only approximates nondualism.

In a sense, holism could be thought of as preliminary or transitional to nondualism. That Prendergast, Fenner, and Krystal should conflate the two doesn’t invalidate the holistic approach toward treatment they advocate, just so long as we understand its limitations. Indeed, “The Sacred Mirror” could be thought of as specializing in the holistic contact point of a bridge they are building to nondualism. Although the healing agencies they invoke may not be full-borne advaita, they clearly are of real value.

There is a feature of nondualism often overlooked in the standard view that merely defines nondualism as not-two. In his book, “Vedanta and Christian Faith”, the late Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths used a traditional formula to define the essential features of the nondual Godhead: “Ultimate reality can be said to be comprised of certain discernible attributes: . . . ‘sat’—being, ‘cit’—consciousness, and ‘ananda’—bliss . . .” This benevolent set of attributes—the living presence of free awareness and love—has clinical application. Effective clinical practice seems to follow the formula “the greater the awareness, the greater the love”. Like most clinical texts, “The Sacred Mirror” is self-conscious about directly addressing love as a viable therapeutic intervention. Occasionally, love is mentioned in a nondual sense, as when Fenner, building on a Buddhist orientation toward nondualism, states: “Another way in which the unconditioned mind unites with conditioned existence is through the union of love and wisdom . . .. The capacity to identify [with the client] is love. The capacity to disidentify is wisdom,”. The book’s only specific reference to love as an essential aspect of the nondual process, however, appears in an interview with Adyashanti in a chapter titled, “Love Returning for Itself.” Unfortunately, even this chapter is pretty short on instructions for therapists. In “The Sacred Mirror” love remains a largely unthematized idealism.
{pagebreak}
Clinically, a host of therapeutic interventions build on the awareness/love equation, attesting to the essential role awareness and love play in the therapeutic process. In one guise or another, many of these appear in “The Sacred Mirror”. Interventions of this nature, which are common in clinical practice, are generally referred to as supportive technique, whereby the sense of us can be specifically engaged therapeutically. Examples include: accurate empathy and unconditional positive regard, mirroring and empathic immersion, focusing, communicative attunement, sensitivity to the intersubjective field, empathic resonance, gestalt awareness, and mindfulness. In fact, mindfulness could be thought of as the appropriate rubric for all of these approaches to developing awareness, which is no doubt why mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular as an intervention in clinical practice. Indeed, the infrequent references to mindfulness in “The Sacred Mirror” constitute a notable absence in the book.

Even so, “The Sacred Mirror” places an inordinate emphasis on awareness, either in the sense of concentrated, focused awareness (i.e., attention), or a more diffused, merely observing state referred to as “witness consciousness”. Leaving aside the authors’ likely confusions about the latter (most of what is described as witness consciousness seems much like the state of an intelligent and alert but nonetheless egoically identified observer), tt at no point does “The Sacred Mirror” come right out and state that love is the healing principle—or explain how love is directly related to awareness. “The Sacred Mirror” engages in a secondary focus that values a vague affective orientation on the part of the client, generally referred to by the following array of desirable attributes: equanimity, peacefulness, kindness, compassion, empathy, and occasionally even self-esteem. Perhaps the taboo in our culture and professional psychology against the appearance of love in therapy has made doing so too controversial for the contributors of this anthology.

In nondualism, the presumption of being a separate self not only misguided, it is impediment to love and happiness. In David Loy’s words: “[T]he nondualistic systems also agree that our usual sense of duality—the sense of separation (hence alienation) between myself and the world ‘I’ am ‘in’—is the root delusion that needs to be overcome.” Yet some contributors to “The Sacred Mirror” assume that this is a reductive, even anti-human view. For example, in her chapter, “Dancing with Form and Emptiness in Intimate Relationship”, Jennifer Welwood argues:

Love does indeed come from beyond us, from pure being, from the absolute source that shines through us and those we love. And the essence of love does involve a dissolving of the boundaries of separation. Yet, defining love purely as a mutual recognition of transpersonal being is incomplete and unsatisfying in human terms . . .. Nondual teachings that mainly emphasize the illusory quality of human experience can, unfortunately, serve as just another dehumanizing force in a world where our basic humanity is already under siege at every turn.

Unfortunately, this way of understanding nondualism takes away the very essence of what is it is to be nondual. Speaking equivocally about the separate self only undermines the ability to address its limitations. Yet, it is understandable how this objection might occur. Attaching meaning to experience is usually thought to be extremely important for human beings, perhaps even our most crucial enterprise. Nonetheless, it is precisely by putting our egoic humanity to the test, indeed, by ultimately transcending it, that the reality of nondualism can make its incontrovertible appearance—and, in doing so, replace our egoic complications with the divine healing properties of awareness and love.

In conventional approaches to psychotherapy, it is often thought that the objects or conditions of one’s love are the source of happiness. As the famed nondualist spiritual master Adi Da Samraj argues, however, being in possession of the objects of your love is not the source of happiness. Love, rather, requires a far more significant gesture of submission: we are obliged to give love—regardless of what happens as a result. Knowing this out front puts us in position of learning the essential lesson of life—which is not merely to be loved, or even to be loving toward this or that other, but to be unqualified love itself.

Ordinary clinical interventions attempt to improve our capacity to adapt to the conditions of ordinary life, but that does not put people directly in touch with the very source of love. Even spiritual orientations can confuse the issue. Simply put, there is an intimate—indeed, a nondual—relationship between awareness and love. The two are inseparable. They are born in us together when self and other truly yield to the greater Love.

In the words of Swami Vivekananda:

This mighty attraction in the direction of God makes all other attractions vanish for him; this mighty, infinite love of God which enters his heart with the divine waters of the Ocean of Love, which is God Himself; there is no place there for little loves . . .. He sees no distinctions; the mighty Ocean of Love has entered into him, and he sees not man in man, but beholds his Beloved everywhere . . .

Obviously, this represents a high standard for clinical practice! Indeed, it could be said that nondual psychotherapy is not really about being better adjusted or espousing a better social ideal—even if for the admittedly useful purpose of getting confused and willful people to behave better. Rather, the purpose of nondual psychotherapy is actually this: enlightenment. Certainly, such is the case for the spiritual traditions from which nondual doctrines are culled. It remains a very open question whether or not any therapeutic measures can measure up to this ultimate task.

Of course, it is perhaps not surprising that “The Sacred Mirror” should be reluctant to address such issues head-on. To date, nondual practices such as mindfulness have to be sanitized of any improper alliances with love, much less spiritual submission to be accepted into clinical practice. Nevertheless, to honor the nondual spiritual traditions from which such practices originate, both love and spirit must surely play as large a role in treatment as any other intervention. In so doing, therapy can perhaps further expand itself across the soul’s continuum. It should be enough for now to ask for the intimacy of a holism brave enough to kneel before the ultimacy of non-dualism, something “The Sacred Mirror” amply delivers.

D. B. Sleeth received an MA in humanistic and transpersonal psychology from Sonoma State University, an MA in counseling psychology from Argosy Graduate School in San Francisco, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. He currently practices family therapy with disadvantaged youth and young adults in Northern California. D.B. Sleeth lives with his wife of 11 years, both of whom are active members of Adidam, the spiritual community of the nondual spiritual master, Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

More about D.B. Sleeth