lotusinthemud

Buddhist Psychology Conference - October 2024 in Spain

4th ITZI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

COLLOQUIUM ON BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY

 

A unique meeting to develop skills and knowledge and to contribute to the on-going development of applied Buddhist psychology.

Theme: Buddhist Psychology has been developing over the past 2500 years. We are aiming to bring together fifty people with an interest in Buddhist Psychology, its nature, development & application. You may attend and participate or present your work & ideas. If you would like to attend and make a presentation we would like to hear from you now as this will assist us in planning the event. It will be a residential conference held in northern Spain in an excellent venue, secluded in the mountains, that we have used before and know well. This is a good place for a colloquium. Previous conferences in this series in Spain, Belgium and Netherlands have been very enjoyable gatherings and have included a wide variety of presentations on aspects of Buddhist psychology and its applications in various forms of therapy, personal development, spiritual practice, organisation and social life. The event will be limited to fifty places, so early booking is advisable.

 

Colloquium: We wish that the majority of people attending will make a presentation of their work, ideas or experience. Presentations may be fifteen, forty-five or ninety minutes. There will also be plenary discussion periods. Presentations may be in the form of papers, led discussion, or experiential workshops. Bring and contribute your approach and experience. This is a time for sharing, creativity, exploration and mutual learning.

 

:: link for more details

 

Booking Information

Early Booking: The cost for early booking is 320€ fully residential. You can pay in other currencies (£300 or $350). To book, please reserve your place at

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globalsangha/1067240#
and follow the instructions for payment.

Journey Work

Dharmavidya David Brazier:

Modern people often think that they can control their feelings and moods independently of their lifestyle and life events. Commonly they attempt to do so by taking medicines and this often leads to a deterioration in health.

 

This attitude is a result of the medicalisation of psychology. The psyche (chitta) responds to experience. Different people do respond to similar experiences differently, but this is not a manifestation of illness, it is mostly a difference of character. There is a basal temperament that a person is born with and then there are the cumulative effects of how they deal with the miscellaneous circumstances that come along. We have a tendency to repeat. If I have been a coward once, I am likely to be a coward again. If I have been brave once, I am likely to be brave again. 

 

In life one is tested by events and the results of one's responses tend to be cumulative.. Things happen. When something happens one has to respond. This means that one exercises one’s will. Intentional action has consequences in the world and in the mind. In every moment of life something new is possible, but the drag of habit is strong. Rather than living out our creative possibilities we tend to go round in circles.

DIPLOMA IN BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY

www.buddhistpsychology.ning.com

 

“DIPLOMA IN BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY”
A FOUR & A HALF SEMESTER PROGRAMME

Course leader: Dr David Brazier

Tutors: Dr Iris Dotan Katz (Israel), Dr Yaya de Andrade (Canada, Brazil), Kimiko Nita (Japan), Nati Menendez (Spain)

 

A unique and in many cases life changing learning experience working with a highly talented team, to develop skills and knowledge and to contribute to the on-going development of applied Buddhist psychology.

 

Theme: Buddhist Psychology has been developing over the past 2500 years. This unusual independent programme presents this wisdom in a form accessible to modern people. The programme based primarily upon the work of Dr. Brazier, has been developing over three decades and has been run in Korean, Spanish and English, It is continuously revised and updated in the light of changing circumstances (covid, zoom, etc.), student experience, and new research and studies. The 2024 intake will be the third run of the current iteration of the course and students will have some interaction with those who are one or two years ahead of them.

 

The programme presents Buddhist teachings as a psychological medium. This is not a course on using Buddhist techniques to assist Western style therapy, but rather an in-depth examination of Buddhist wisdom applied as psychology:  the spiritual path from a psychological point of view and  psychological work from a spiritual perspective. It imparts important, liberating, interpersonal skills, personal insight and develops Buddhist compassion.

 

Format: 

• Study Material: theoretical and stimulus material, mostly text, but also including audio and video items, is presented on dedicated web pages with associated experiential exercises for students to perform and report back on.
• Co-operative Learning - students see and comment on each other's work.
• Seminars by zoom every two or three weeks led by staff with time for student inter-action.
• Individual Tutorials.
• Peer Learning  Groups. A vitally important part of the course.
• On-line Weekend Workshops three times per year (January, June & October) with lectures, case presentation, experiential groupwork and topic discussions.
• Summer School: A one week optional in-person summer school is  offered in August in France

The course is divided into six week units called "Classrooms". Spring Semesters (February-July) contain four "Classrooms".  Autumn Semesters (September-January) have three Classrooms. Each Classroom contains three topics for study. There are 16 "Classrooms" altogether.

 

Content: The study materials introduce the major Buddhist teachings common to most schools of Buddhism presented as psychology, showing their applications in personal practice, interpersonal work, psychotherapy and society. The material is quite extensive and requires a minimum of three hours per week. There are no grades, but there are deadlines.

Suitable for: This is a programme for therapists who want to deepen their understanding of the Buddhist perspective,  for Buddhist practitioners wishing to learn a therapeutic and inter-personal way of applying the Buddhist teachings, and for all wishing to deepen their insight into their own lives and relationships with others.

 

Time Zones: Students come from many countries and zones. Seminars are generally repeated morning and evening European time so as to provide options.

 

Pre-Entry: We are aiming to start the next intake in February 2024 if there is a viable cohort of students registered. Students who book early may start to attend seminars from their date of enrolment but will not receive course materials until the intake date.

Staff: 

Dr David Brazier, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher, author of  sixteen books including Zen Therapy and many other writings. Co-editor of the Oxford Manual of Meditation. English, living in France.

Dr. Iris Dotan Katz, clinical psychologist with a private practice in Tel Aviv has many years of experience in Zen and Pureland Buddhism and in socially engaged action and peacemaking.

Dr. Yaya de Andrade, a Canadian retired psychologist, originally from Brazil, lived and worked in Vancouver for more than 40 years. She has  special interest working with refugees, indigenous peoples, and other groups recovering from traumatic circumstances, wars and major disasters around the world. She currently lives near Toronto.

Kimiko Nita, clinical psychologist, specialises in work with children and young adults, has a private practice for adult clients in Tokyo, and a special interest in Naikan therapy. 

Natividad Menendez, counsellor and focussing practitioner, based in Spain.
Dr. Priti Vaishnav, from India, who has extensive experience in working in areas of social distress around the world offers administrative support

Fees:  £225 per semester (equivalent to £1025 for the whole course over two years and three months).

 

To Register an Interest: Please write to Jisshas <[email protected]>
giving: Full name, Date of birth. Street address. E-mail address. Details of your background in Buddhism (if any). Details of your background in psychology/therapy (if any). Your reasons for interest in the course.

On Spiritual Bypassing and Relationships: The Non-Dual Mistake

:: via bodhicitta monastery

 

An excerpt from an interview with John Welwood

“The cure for pain is in the pain.

~ Rumi

 

Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

 

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an “occupational hazard” of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

 

Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite: Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling. One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.

 

I’m interested in how spiritual bypassing plays out in relationships, where it often wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational wounds. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.

 

The basic human wound, which is prevalent in the modern world, forms around not feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. And as we internalize how we were parented, our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis for valuing others, becomes damaged. I call this a “relational wound“ or the “wound of the heart.”

on spiritual bypassing and relationship

:: by John Welwood

Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an “occupational hazard” of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite: Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling. One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.

I’m interested in how spiritual bypassing plays out in relationships, where it often wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational wounds. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.

Congruence

Dharmavidya David Brazier:

CONGRUENCE

INTRODUCTION

Loosely speaking, congruence means genuineness. People are congruent when they are not trying to appear to be anything other than what they are. Congruence is the opposite of dissemblance. It is closely related to a number of other terms, some of which will concern us below: honesty, authenticity, transparency, immediacy, spontaneity; yet its meaning does not precisely coincide with any of these.

As a topic in psychotherapy, congruence is concerned with a person's attempts to achieve harmony in their way of being. We may speak here particularly of harmony between body and mind. Body, in this statement, refers primarily to behaviour, to all the movements and sensations which constitute our experience of our physical being. Mind refers to our sentiments, beliefs, emotions, thoughts and imagery. Sometimes we make this same distinction by talking about a person's "outer" and "inner" lives.

In practice, the line between body and mind cannot be drawn with precision. Nonetheless, the distinction is meaningful so long as we do not start to think that it is absolute. The more congruent we are, the less easy it becomes to distinguish one from the other. In Carl Rogers' terms, a person who is congruent becomes his (her) organism.

The term congruence is derived from a Latin word meaning harmony. I am incongruent when I am not in harmony with myself. A person who smiles (body) while actually feeling miserable (mind), is said to be incongruent. Much psychotherapy, personal growth and spiritual work revolves around the attempt to achieve self harmony, to eliminate incongruence. Incongruence is one of the most used sign-posts in psychotherapy. When the client manifests signs of incongruence, that is where the therapist is likely to focus attention.

While what has just been said is not untrue, there is a more revealing way to think about it. To say that therapy is about eliminating incongruence gives us a simple idea of the process. It tells us where to look, for instance. On the other hand, the human being is infinitely more complex than this simple prescription suggests. When we do focus upon some element of apparent incongruence in ourselves or in another person, what we find is that we are beginning to enter into an appreciation of some of that human complexity.

The Psychotic Imagination

Dharmavidya David Brazier:

THE PSYCHOTIC IMAGINATION

INTRODUCTION

Nobody is completely mad. Nobody is completely sane. On the stage of each of our lives are many players, and all of them are crazy in their own particular way.

Generally we are inclined to define madness in terms of failure to adhere to consensual reality. DSM IIIR defines psychosis as "gross impairment in reality testing and the creation of a new reality.. delusions or hallucinations (without insight into their pathological nature)" (p.404). The consensus about reality, however, shifts from culture to culture and from one period of history to another, and indeed, from circumstance to circumstance. The conventions by which we live are themselves full of contradictions. Furthermore, all of us depart from consensual reality as soon as we fall asleep and there are none of us who do not harbour phantasies which, if acted out in the "real" world, would not be considered mad by many people.

As therapist's we come into contact with many people whose views of the world are different from our own, and different from those of the people around them. Often such people wonder if they are mad, in which case they almost certainly are not. Some are quite sure that only they are sane, in which case they are almost certainly mad.

The first step we must take in learning to tap into our own psychotic imagination is to recognise that madness is a paradoxical and relative phenomenon. Those who come to be publicly declared mad are not, in most cases, fundamentally different from anyone else. Generally it is a case of their particular madness having ceased to work in the social context in which they live and their communications about it having become incomprehensible to those around them.

None of this should, however, lead us to believe that madness is a benign condition which should not worry us at all. Our imaginations are capable of transporting us to the heights of ecstasy and the pits of despair, to creativity and to destruction. It is surely our fear of the tempests which may blow within each of us which leads us commonly to try to draw a hard and fast line between ourselves and those who can be classified as "mad".

To aspire to be a therapist is equally surely to be willing to entertain the possibility that there is no such line, for a therapist is one who ventures into the other world, the world of the client. We will never be able to do this without the aid of our own psychotic imagination.

Letting Go: The significance of separation and return in therapy and life ~ Dharmavidya David Brazier

From the archive:

by David Brazier

Endings are immensely significant. They have deep symbolic, which is to say, subjective, importance. How the experience of loss is handled conditions our ability to relate again. The inner decisions made at such a time can have lasting consequences. Losses can deepen appreciation of life or undermine faith.

Everyone has suffered loss and separation. For many clients the primary reason for coming into therapy is to find some relief from the pain of separation. Yet therapy itself is a temporary relationship which will come to an ending. How this ending is regarded and celebrated may have lasting results.

Why is separation so painful? Why do we fear loss? Why is grief so bitter? And why do some grow strong as a result of their painful experience while others decline as a result of similar experience? What can we do as therapists to give our clients the opportunity to grow strong and how can we avoid reinforcing their sense of defeat? In short, can we understand how psychotherapy heals?

This paper looks at three of the classic theories of psychotherapy with a view to seeking answers to these questions. The theories of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Carl Rogers at first glance seem to have little in common. One is tempted to think that their separation is unbridgeable. The argument of this paper, however, is that a fruitful reconciliation may yet be possible.

To begin, I would like us to consider the fact that one of the most bitterly evocative considerations at any time of loss is reflection upon the fact that many things can now never be repeated. "We will never again walk together in the park hand in hand." It is thoughts such as this which bring the most copious tears. So what does it mean that the desire to repeat is so deeply embedded in us?

Anger, Blame, Guilt and Sorrow ~ Dharmavidya David Brazier

Anger, Blame, Guilt and Sorrow:

by David Brazier

This paper is concerned with the ways in which people respond to change, conflict, threat and hurt. It considers the proper place and function of "negative" emotions and the role of therapy in helping us to learn from them. It draws on the authors practice experience and upon the theory of humanistic, analytical and phenomenological psychology, both western and Buddhist.

 

INEVITABLE SUFFERING

a) A culture of repression:

In this life we all experience frustration, loss and injury. Our culture, however, does not provide us with very reliable ways of coping with these events. The culture of the personal growth movement offers some alternative approaches but these too seem often inadequate to the task. Neither the doctrine of the stiff upper lip nor that of letting it all hang out seem to do full justice to our needs.

Every society encourages some emotions and discourages others. A great deal of effort can be expended on "impression management" (Goffman 1959). Keeping face can be even more important in some other cultures than in our own (see eg Doi 1986). In our society, anger, blaming, guilt and sorrow are generally regarded as negative states and discouraged. Although the Victorians believed in the stiff upper lip and the maintenance of proper decorum by the imperial race, it was probably the experience of the first world war which led to the general adoption by people in Britain of a policy of keeping emotions hidden. In a situation in which everybody had lost someone, one person's weeping could bring everyone to tears. People learned to bury their feelings in order to get on. This is understandable. The cost of such repression to individuals can, however, be high if it is sustained without respite. Emotional wounds may be kept out of sight but in that condition they do not seem to heal very well and people who have nursed their hurt for many years may suffer a great range of psycho-somatic disturbance. Also, repression does not eliminate, merely remove from consciousness.

Jung showed through his studies in word association and later through dream analysis that repression creates a "shadow" consciousness where the thoughts and feelings which one is unwilling to accept nonetheless continue to exercise an unrecognised influence over one's behaviour, relationships and decision making. "The shadow consists of those psychic qualities which, because of their incompatibility with conscious values and goals, have been denied a place in the person's consciousness. These suppressed aspects of personality must be integrated with the rest of the personality if we are to become the authentic and whole persons that we should be" (Benner 1988, p56)

Psychological repression in our society also owes something to the rise of science. There is a widespread belief that pain, discomfort and trouble are unnecessary and that when they occur it is because something has gone wrong. Showing a negative feeling thus becomes an admission of failure. In our materialistic society we believe that the answer to all problems is a material one. And when things are not going as they should, science even provides pills to help us repress the unwanted feelings which arise. Science and technology are expected to be able to put everything right. Of course, this is a delusion.

Perhaps this delusion is beginning to fade. We are perhaps beginning to be a little disenchanted with the mirage of endless comfort which modern civilization seemed to promise. Fortunately or unfortunately science has not eliminated distress. It has given us many good things and we can enjoy no longer having to live in hovels but it has not stopped people from quarrelling nor has it stopped them from dying. Rather it has given us a larger range of ways by which we may die and more things to quarrel over. It has eliminated some diseases and created others. It has given us bombs as well as washing machines. Compared with life in third world countries we all live better than kings, yet, on the whole, we are no happier. The materialist approach brings some tangible benefits but does not solve the problem of human misery.

Essentially, the materialist approach consists of believing that all will be well if only circumstances change. This doctrine is faulty on a number of counts. Firstly, the world is not so constituted that a change of circumstances - any change of circumstances - will yield enduring satisfaction. Secondly, it is change itself which is the trigger for most of our misery. Thirdly, the very idea that there is some other better place or time than this one is itself an idea which causes distress.

More recently a different idea has come to the fore. If repression does not work then the answer must be to become self-expressive. This is the idea that is commonly found in growth groups. There is no doubt that for a person who has repressed feelings for many years to have an opportunity to express them in circumstances which provide safety can be immensely healing and this is an important aspect of psychotherapy to which this paper will return later. On the other hand, there is also undoubtedly something wrong with the extension of this into a doctrine of selfishness in which individuals feel they have a right to special consideration at all times. It simply is not possible for everybody to have the largest slice of cake.

Point Mind and Three Locas ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya:

SIX VIJÑANA MIND MODEL
One of the ways to understand how conceptions of psychology have changed since the time of the Buddha is by looking at how the model of the mind has elaborated. In the earliest scriptures, the Buddha talks in terms of six vijñanas. These are the five senses plus “manovijñana”. Manovijñana is, as it were “the mind's eye” except that in this conception there is no mind separate from these six. In this earliest model, these six constitute the complete basis of what we call mind. What is thought of as self was understood as an illusory effect of the repetitiveness of the activity of these six.

An implication of this model is that the mind composed in this way has no content. What we nowadays think of as the content of the mind was conceived to be external. Buddha talks of eighteen dhatu or “bases”. These are the six vijnaña faculties (eye, ear, etc), their respective objects (sights, sounds, etc.) and the power that links the two. So when we say that we have something “in mind”, this was conceived as the manovijñana perceiving a mind object via a mind object power. So when we say “A thought just came to me,” this was understood in a much more literal sense than we generally intend. The thought did come to us. Perhaps it was brought by a deva. Devas are beings, invisible to most of us, who nonetheless influence our lives. Among other thing, they are the (external) delivery system of the things that we moderns think are inside us.

Now it is an experiential fact that until the thought “just came” one was not conscious of it, so literally one did not have it “in mind”, so this original six vijñana mind model in many ways reflected the phenomenology of mind (the way we actually experience it) with some accuracy.

LATER DEVELOPMENTS
Later, by the time that the Lankavatara Sutra was composed, this model had been added to. A few centuries after the Buddha people were thinking of the mind as having content and as therefore having a “store”. The word for a store or accumulation is alaya. We are familiar with this word, since it occurs in the name of the mountains north of India, the Himalaya, “him” being snow. The Himalaya are full of snow that just landed there and stuck to other snow until there was a great accumulation. Similarly, it came to be thought that the mind accumulated mental formations (samskara) and that these were stored as the alaya. In time, just as the word "store" can mean both the accumulation (eg. a squirrel’s store of nuts) and the place where the accumulation is kept, alaya became part of the topography of mind. But if the mind has a store - a kind of hard disc, to use a computer analogy - then it also needs a processing unit to do things with these mind contents. This processing unit is called manas. So now we arrive at an eight vijñana model: the six original vijñanas plus manas and the alaya.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE POINT MIND: LOKA
Here, however, I’d like to stay with the six vijnaña model and the eighteen dhatu, since it is interesting to reflect upon a completely different way of conceiving mental process from the one we are used to. There are a number of interesting implications of this model.

If the mind has no content, then it is, as it were, like a point moving about in a domain. There could be a number of domains. These domains are called loka. In particular, the unenlightened mind moves about in the kamaloka. Kama (as in Kamasutra) means sensual desire. The kamaloka is ruled over by Mara, who is the god of death. So the point mind bounces about from one kama to another like a ball in a pinball machine. When the pin ball reaches the bottom, it is shot back up again. In principle there is no reason why this should not go on forever. This is the functioning of samsara.

On the other hand, it might be possible for the mind to bounce right out of the machine, as it were, and land up in a different loka. In particular, it might arrive in the rupaloka. The word rupa originally meant an icon or idol, in other words, something worshiped. Now, to be in a world where everything around you is worthy of worship is quite different from being in a world where everything is an object of craving. The rupaloka, therefore, is a world in which the relation of the six vijnaña to their respective objects is more or less the opposite of what it is in the kamaloka. In the kamaloka, one craves for this, that and the other, so these things have a coercive power, pulling one this way and that, like a cork on the waves. In the rupaloka, however, one worships each thing that comes along, so there is a respectful attitude. This is liberating. With craving one moves toward whereas with reverence one sets oneself at a distance. Thus moving from the kamaloka to the rupaloka is an act of renunciation.

MARA
The rupaloka is outside of the domain of Mara. Mara, therefore, strives to ensure that beings do not leave the kamaloka. This is why, when the Buddha was on the point of enlightenment, Mara assailed him with every kind of sensual delight, trying to keep him in the domain of kama. However, the Buddha-to-be had already arrived at a turning away (paravritti) from sensuality and even Mara’s most powerful attempts were to no avail. They were turned into celestial flowers, or rupa, in this original sense of the term. When everything is rupa in this sense, there is still a power at work, but it is functioning in a quite different way. We could say that instead of pulling you down it pulls you up.

MARANA
Just as in our language terms can have an elevated and a common usage, so rupa in the context of the kamaloka refers to the things that one “worships” in a mundane sense, as some people worship money and others worship status or sex. You can even, in this sense, worship icecream or chocolate or even narcotics. So, in the kamaloka, rupa refers to the way we perceive things when they exercise the power of evoking desire. Rupa in the kamaloka has a power, but it is a mundane rather than a holy power. This mundane power is called marana. You can see “mara” within this word, so marana could be translated as deathness. Everything in the kamaloka is deathly, wasting our lives and yet endlessly pulling us back into more and more wasted incarnations.

THREE LOKAS
Now in our modern way of thinking in which we assume that all this that is described above is actually going on inside our heads rather than in external domains, we naturally tend to think that enlightenment will be some kind of mental content that we are going to acquire, that it is something that is going to be inside us, that we shall discover, say, that we have got Buddha nature in us. We read plenty that tells us that this is not the right way to think of it, but it is a natural tendency when one has a modern sense of psychology.

In the point mind model, on the other hand, what is conceived to be happening is not that the mind is taking things into itself, but that it is moving through lokas. We might, with help from the Buddha, move from the kamaloka into the rupaloka, but this is not all. Beyond the rupaloka is the arupaloka. If rupaloka is the world of icons and idols, arupa is the domain where they are absent. Icons and idols are not worshipped for themselves, but for what they represent. We bow to a statue of Buddha, but we do not think that Buddha is a piece of stone or metal. Beyond the rupa is the dharma and the dharma is formless (arupa). The kamaloka is a domain in which everything is profane; the rupaloka is a domain where everything is holy; the arupaloka is beyond the holy and the profane. In the kamaloka one is seized by the fever of desire. In the rupaloka one is taken up by the holy passion of devotion. In the arupaloka one is at peace.

In addition to the three lokas talked about here there are many other lokas - like the six lokas that we see depicted in the Tibetan Wheel of Life, but most of them are sub-realms of kamaloka. The threefold schema set out in this essay gives an overall framework.

One of the epithets of the Buddha is lokavid. This means that he clearly perceives all the lokas. He can move between them at will because he is lokuttara, which means he has gone beyond them all. He may be most at home in the arupaloka, but compassion requires him to move also in the other lokas in order to reach other beings and help them to escape from the domain of Mara. Thus, in the wheel of life pictures, there is a small Buddha depicted in every domain, even in the hell realms.

CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
Thus, conceptions of mind, mental factors and mental processes, as well as their relation to the world and the nature of the world itself have changed over the centuries. This is the same in all enduring cultures. The world as it was conceived in the time of Jesus was quite different from how it was understood in the middle ages and both the classical and the medieval were vastly different from our modern conception. By medieval times, Buddhism had developed an eight vijñana and even a nine vijñana model and with such a model, internalised mental constructs were recognised and it was even possible for some Buddhist philosophers to go to the opposite extreme and deny the existence of the external world: instead of everything coming from outside, now it could be asserted that everything was projection of mind, but that is another story.

Although the conceptual framework of psychology has changed over the years, the basic message of the Buddha remains the same. It has been a challenge for Buddhist teachers in different ages to find ways to express the Dharma in the idiom of the day. We can ground our practice in a modern psychological framework to good effect. However, there is also some value in trying to project ourselves back into the framework that informed the earliest Buddhist writings as this enables us to understand them better. It also throws our modern ideas into perspective, showing that they are not the only way of thinking about things and this relativisation liberates us from a kind of complacency.

The mind lost in the kamaloka has no hope except to be rescued by Buddha and thus find a refuge. When it does so, it finds itself in the rupaloka where everything points to the arupaloka beyond. Such is the spiritual life. Ultimately there is the state of lokuttara, beyond all of these worlds, which is Buddhahood. This is one of the ways in which Shakyamuni, back in the early days, showed people the Dharma.

*****

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