Gods and Buddhism Come to the Communicative Approach
by Robert Langs, M.D.
There are, I believe, remarkable correspondences between Buddhist philosophy and the communicative approach. Buddhism’s basic quest is to find ways to reduce the inevitable measure of human suffering that every human must endure and cope with in the course of their lives. And it offers two means of accomplishing this wondrous goal: Enlightenment, which entails a deeper understanding of the human mind and the nature of reality as perceived by that mind, and contemplation or meditation, which is a means of bringing peace to the suffering psyche.
The communicative approach is anything but meditative, but it is a powerful attempt to better understand the human mind in all of its glories and foibles. It is, as well, an effort to discover ways in which we can reduce human suffering through deep insight and personal change.
In its search for enlightenment, the communicative approach recently has formulated the existence of two inner Gods within the deep unconscious part of the human mind. Each has evolved through natural selection, driven by the human need to comprehend the impossibilities of life and the obstacles to inner peace created by our unrestrained inclinations to act violently when faced with life threatening dangers or provoked by others. And it is with these Gods in hand that the approach has turned to seeking solutions to the questions raised by Buddhist philosophers regarding the true nature of the human mind and the deeper sources of human pain.
Human suffering, the Buddha said, comes from excessive sensual desires and from profound ignorance, especially when it comes to the true nature of the mind and reality. The fundamental avoidance of violence, (ahimsa), was so inherent to Buddha’s thinking that its role in human unhappiness received less attention than it deserved, but it is clear that such tendencies also are a basic source of human suffering.
In their search for answers as to how to best deal with these sources of suffering, the Buddhists came to understand a great deal about the human mind. Buddhist philosophers, perhaps best represented by two fourth century Northern India monks, Asanga and Vasubhandu, proposed that there is a basic flaw in the design of the human mind which accounts for our misperceptions of the nature of reality and which is a root, unconscious cause of much human pain. The search for illumination must, therefore, be focused on the human mind itself, the mind that perceives and misperceives reality according to the mind’s own nature (read: according to its own evolved design), and which forms a unity with the realities it perceives. Rejecting dualism, these philosophers were of the ‘mind only’ school of thought, and they stressed the extent to which all humans are united in a contingent, seamless whole. They would have been appalled by the Freudian and Jungian separation of patient and therapist as distinct entities and quite accepting of holistic and systemic approaches to the therapeutic interaction-to which the communicative approach is a strong adherent.
A fundamental human search, both individually and philosophically (universally), is to discover or arrive at ‘Ultimate or Absolute Truths’-the deep, fundamental truths of nature, both mental and physical. These truths stand in contrast to ‘Conventional Truths’-ordinary day-to-day truths that are, however, self-deceptive and misleading. In this context, the Buddhists postulate the existence of ‘Store Consciousness,’ an unconscious system of the mind that affects and generally distorts our perceptions of reality. The sense that Buddhist philosophers had of conscious and unconscious mental operations and conscious and unconscious perceptions of reality is quite impressive. These realizations are, again, striking forerunners of communicative thinking.
Personal freedom and relief from suffering, (dukkha), come from grasping Absolute Truths that illuminate the true nature of reality and the human mind. Although it is evident that this is achieved through self-observation and the study of others, for the Buddhist, the main avenue for these accomplishments is that of meditation, which takes a person to a higher level of consciousness and a state of nirvana-a mental state of fundamental enlightenment that immediately resolves itself into an expansion of realisation.
The communicative approach can be thought of as a modern day extension of Buddhist philosophy and thinking. In keeping with Buddhist thinking, the approach sees human suffering as inevitable, and stresses far more than does Buddhism, the role of aggression and of human mortality and the inevitability of personal death as major sources of human pain. In keeping with the holism of Buddhist thinking, the approach sees all humans as joined in a spiritual brotherhood/sisterhood of shared pain and anxiety, and strives to aid all humans in their search for effective ways of coping with and reducing these inevitable pains. And, as noted, it sees the therapeutic interaction as a seamless whole, as taking place in a bipersonal field within which patient and therapist are united both consciously and unconsciously to form a single unit.
The communicative approach seeks relief from human suffering through active understanding rather than through meditation and moments of emptiness in thought and need. The goal of the approach is help people to achieve inner peace through the development of deep and unique insights that change their understanding of themselves, their minds, and reality as perceived by those minds. It is to be noted, however, as is true of many of the polar opposites discovered by the Buddhists, that this search for deep understanding can exist side-by-side with the search for meditative peace. The two approaches to spiritual and emotional quietude can and should supplement each other, forming a unique whole with healing powers that lie well beyond the calming effects of either approach carried out separately.
Buddhism was built on profound and direct observations of human nature and the operations of the human mind. The communicative approach, in contrast, was built on a foundation of sophisticated, conditional observations of how the human mind copes with specific, emotionally-charged impingements and events. Where Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi Tree and gained wisdom through contemplation, I sat in a therapist’s office and gained wisdom through a process called ‘trigger decoding’-unraveling the disguised meanings of dreams and stories in light of the triggering events that evoked them.
Where the Buddha self-observed and introspected, I opened myself to patients’ use of narrative communications which enabled me to study how the human mind copes with emotional triggers. This effort was facilitated by the fact that the deep unconscious part of the human mind copes almost entirely with immediate events and with prior incidents that involve the person with whom a person is communicating. Thus, the encoded or disguised meanings of the dreams and stories patients told me essentially were responses to triggers that I had created-things I’d said and done (and as it turned out, said and done mainly in respect to the ground rules of the therapy). Knowing the stimulus as well as the response enabled me to fathom the nature of the mind that mediated between the two and gain insight into the design and operations of the emotion-processing mind.
For the Buddha, inner experience served as his guide and abnegation was his solution. For me, decoding dreams and other narrative communications in light of their evocative triggers provided understanding and thereby, active, insightful solutions to emotional conflicts and pain. It became apparent that we, as humans, possess a deep unconscious wisdom system that encodes extremely effective resolutions to human suffering. Where the Buddha could only opt for renunciation, the communicative approach could opt for appropriate renunciation supplemented by powerful and healing deep unconscious insights.
It is worthy of note that it was possible to discover the design of the emotion-processing mind-a critical Ultimate Truth-only within the controlled conditions of the psychotherapy situation. This proved to be the case firstly, because the human mind is deeply invested in those who offer healing ministrations, and thus the deep unconscious system is entirely focused on what therapists say and do. And secondly, because the therapy situation has a definable set of ground rules or framework and in individual therapy is limited to two interacting individuals. Two person systems are manageable and relatively easy to observe and sort out. In contrast, systems with three or more people and with uncertain ground rules and frames, and circumstances that involve multiple interactions and systems-as we have in everyday life-are all but impossible to sort out.
Thus, the psychotherapy situation, while devoted primarily to lessening patients’ misery, served uniquely as a quasi-laboratory in which key stimuli were identifiable and thus key responses could be deeply understood for their Ultimate Truths. In everyday life, there are too many sources of stimuli, too many people involved with one person, and too many stimuli impinging from moment-to-moment, for the nature of mind and reality to be effectively sorted out. The situation is much like that of subatomic particles, which abound within and around us, but whose true nature and Ultimate Truths can be investigated only in a laboratory where both the inputs (stimuli) and outputs (responses) can be carefully measured.
The communicative approach has discovered the existence in the human mind of an emotion-processing mind with two basic systems-a conscious system attached to awareness and a deep unconscious system with no direct access to awareness and which therefore encodes its (unconscious) perceptions and adaptive processing activities within our dreams and stories. The Buddhist proposition of two kinds of truths joins hands with the communicative concept of a two system, emotion-processing mind and two ways of experiencing reality, each of which yield its own truths. The conscious mind is the mind of conventional truths and as such, it is fraught with self-deceptions and misreadings of reality. And as I’ve discussed in other essays for this site, unresolved human death anxieties are one of the main deep causes of these conscious system distortions, which arise largely because of our need to deny our own mortality to an extent that prompts us to fail to see and register consciously many events and many meanings of events that arouse our existential death anxieties.
Ultimate Truths therefore are the province of the deep unconscious system of the emotion-processing mind. They are unconsciously perceived and processed. They are not revealed directly to the conscious mind, but only in disguised form in our dreams and other narratives. In this sense, the truth of the Buddhist contention that reality is a dream within a dream translates communicatively into the proposition that the deep truths of reality are disguised and encoded within our dreams. Trigger decoding these dreams therefore reveals the Ultimate Truths of these realities as perceived unconsciously by our minds.
Ultimate Truths are perceived and processed by that part of the deep unconscious mind that is known as ‘the deep unconscious wisdom system.’ Spiritually, this system may be thought of as an evolved inner God-an Inner God of Wisdom and Healing. This inner God processes incoming events and their meanings with near-infinite perceptiveness and intelligence, and encodes its profoundly wise recommendations for adaptation and healing. In order to truly benefit from its profound wisdom, you must, of necessity, decode these encoded recommendations with full knowledge of both the challenging event and the disguised responses of the inner God. True healing relies on effective trigger decoding.
The problem of establishing sound and unfailing guidelines for human behavior in our search for the good life and moral integrity takes us to another evolved inner God. In its desperate quest for survival and the denial of death, the conscious mind is easily corrupted and is a poor guide in matters of ethical and moral behavior. Operating unconsciously (entirely outside of awareness), however, is an Inner God of Ethics and Morality that embodies a sound set of values and a strong moral code on the basis of which it evaluates our every action. It has a true sense of proper restraint and allowable satisfactions in respect to sensuality and violence, and it judges us accordingly.
Indications are that this inner God has evolved mainly to help humans control their inordinate inclinations toward violence against others when frustrated, deprived, harmed, and the like. Like an unconscious conscience, this inner God unconsciously perceives the true nature of our actions, evaluates their moral qualities, and silently arranges for rewards or punishments according to its own, highly valid criteria. It is, then, an inner God that sees and knows the Ultimate Truths of our social actions and, with utter fairness, it rewards true compassion for others and all manner of ethical behaviors. But it also unconsciously responds to our unnecessarily harming others and our ethical violations by driving us unknowingly toward self-defeating and self-punishing behaviors. Thus, ethical actions do indeed reduce human suffering, while immoral actions increase it, often without our knowing it. Much of self-arranged human suffering arises in this way.
It can be seen, then, that the communicative approach has discovered that natural selection has evolved two human inner Gods that operate outside of awareness, but serve us without reservation in our quest for peace and comfort in this difficult life of ours. Attaining this type of higher yet deeper consciousness, which involves the use of trigger decoding (again-deciphering encoded messages in light of their evocative triggers), that provides us with genuine and healing insights into our own minds-their gifts and their malformations. Indeed, the basic flaw in the human mind, spoken of so eloquently by the Buddhists, is none other than the design of the denial-prone, self-punishing conscious mind. It is this mind with which we knowingly perceive and cope, and which, because of its flawed and overly-defensive design, and because of the strong influence of the Inner God of Ethics and Morality, that is the major source of our own undoing. As the Buddhists tell us, to attain peace, look to, and find ways to change, your own mind. And as the communicative approach tells us, one way to do this is by trigger decoding your dreams and stories in order to reveal the Absolute Truths of who you are and what your inner and outer realities truly are as well. This is one of the most compelling and effective means of achieving inner peace and a life of joy and goodness.
Deep unconscious truths are painful to grasp, yet in their pain lies a nucleus of healing and peace that every human on earth can cherish and benefit from. Let there be more deep insight into ourselves within this troubled world of ours. And let communicative understanding enlighten our minds so they may turn to meditation knowing that peace comes both through deep understanding and deep repose.
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