Whereas, official Psychiatry is hesitant delineating the causal factors in mental disorders, Physiological Psychiatry seems to give the impression that these mental disorders are caused by biological factors. See Schizophrenia: Dopamine causal hypothesis; bipolar affective disorder: norepinephrine causal hypothesis; depression: serotonin causal hypothesis; anxiety: GABA causal hypothesis.
Clearly, there seem putative biochemical correlations with the various mental disorders. However, this situation does not necessarily prove that mental disorders are caused by disordered biochemical states. The identified biochemical disorders may only predispose persons to think in a manner that leads to mental disorders? At any rate, most of the phamacotherapeutic regime predicated on the assumptions that mental disorders are caused by chemical imbalances do not seem to heal mental disorders. Perhaps, it is time we sought different understanding of the etiology and healing of mental disorders?

HYPOTHESIS

In this paper, I offer a hypothesis that mental disorders are caused by individuals’ search for worth, meaning and purpose, in a world that, apparently, lack in worth, meaning and purpose?
Our world, as existential thinkers like Sartre, Camus, Jasper and Heidegger pointed out, seem to have no apparent meaning and purpose to it. Human life on earth seems worthless, meaningless and purposeless.
The individual’s body is food for worms, William Shakespeare observed in Hamlet. We are born and will die and rot. We seem the play things of nature. Virus, bacteria, fungi destroy human bodies, as they destroy other biological forms. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, draughts, and other natural disasters destroy human life, as if human beings have no value. Other human beings if they so choose can kill the individual as he can kill them.
All said, empirical evidence indicates that human life does not seem to have any apparent worth. We are born and must die and become manure that fertilizes plants. There does not seem any meaning and purpose to our lives other than our desire to live, to survive, and survive for what we do not know. Any serious observer of the human condition cannot fail but conclude that human beings are not special in the eyes of nature. In so far that human beings seem to have worth, it is self conferred and that worth seem made up, fictional and not real for if the individual has real worth, how come microorganisms make a meal of his body?
My thesis is that the mentally ill to be person is generally a very perceptive child and perceives that as persons that human beings do not seem to have any empirical worth and that their lives are meaningless and purposeless. I believe that this perception is reached before adolescence.
Perceiving himself and other people as worthless and believing that his life and other people’s lives are meaningless and purposeless, the mentally ill to child refuses to accept his obviously accurate assessment of human existence on planet earth. In place of worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposeless, he posits their alternatives: worth, meaning and purpose. Where he perceives a worthless self he posits an ideal self.
The abstract and mentally constructed ideal self and ideal everything is designed to give the sensitive individual personal worth and give his life on earth meaning and purpose.
Having postulated an ideal self concept, and its image form, ideal self image (human beings seem to think in concepts and images), the individual feels an obsessive compulsive pressure to attain that imaginary self.
In pursuing his impossible goal, he feels like his life has worth, meaning and purpose. But the price he pays for his imaginary worth, meaning and purpose is that he literally becomes a slave to the pursuit of his ego ideals and ideals of who other people should be and what the world ought to become.
If he were to stop seeking to actualize his ego ideals, his life would suddenly lack in worth, meaning and purpose. Cessation of the pursuit of the ideals would bring to the fore what was denied and repressed into the individual’s unconscious: the awareness that his life has no worth, meaning and purpose.
The awareness of his existential worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposelessness may stimulate existential depression in such a person. To avoid awareness of the ugly realities of his being, he may use his imagination to invent even a more grandiose sense of worth, meaning and purpose for himself. He may posit a very seeming important self and pursue it. In the process, he may experience schizophrenia, or delusion disorder or manic depression (bipolar affective disorder).

SELF CONSCIOUSNESS

Mental disorder is unified. The pursuit of worth, meaning and purpose are unified and where one is pursued the others are pursued. Indeed, such seeing different phenomenon as self consciousness is part of the individual’s efforts to seem worthwhile. Self consciousness emanates from an effort to have other people accept the false ideal, superior self as who one is, and awareness that it is not who one is in fact and that as such other people could appreciate that fact. Self consciousness is rooted in the misguided effort to get other people to validate the individual’s imaginary worthy self. If the individual did not have a desire for a special separated self, he would not be self conscious.
The mentally ill acutely perceives the worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposelessness of being as a separated human being housed in body that will die and struggles to give himself mentally constructed fictional worth, meaning and purpose. His goals cannot be attained in the empirical world since they are fictions and imaginary. A pure mental construct of reality cannot be attained in the world of space, time and matter.

THEISM AND ATHEISM

The mentally ill has two options: give up his pursuit of fictional worth, meaning and purpose and accept that he is living a worthless, meaningless and purposeless existence or somehow convince himself that there is worth, meaning and purpose outside this world.
The atheist accepts that he is living a worthless, meaningless and purposeless existence and accommodates himself to that reality without illusions that he has worth or that his life has meaning and purpose; he is just like any other animal life, and when he dies his body rots and becomes fertilizer for other animal lives.
The religionist gives himself faith in what he believes is a better self, a self that lies outside the reality of space, time and matter, the world of spirit; he believes in God and after death existence. The religionist believes that God is beyond space, time and matter and, as such, is permanent, changeless and unified; he believes that in the world of God all beings are the same and equal and as immortal as God, their creator; such beliefs, apparently, gives the religionist worth, meaning and purpose.
Worth, meaning and purpose cannot inhere in the human body. Just thinking about what people do with their bodies, eat, defecate, have sex etc makes the sensitive person want to vomit. The human body at best will live a hundred and twenty years and die and smell to high heaven; as such, it cannot have worth, meaning and purpose. Worth, meaning and purpose, if they exist, must be outside body.

NORMALCY

The normal person is, more or less, like a satisfied animal; he seems not capable of appreciating the worthlessness, meaninglessness and purposelessness of being. This observation gave R.D Laing (1965) the impression that psychotics are higher evolved persons than normal persons. Laing believed that the psychotic was akin to mystics. In his view, normal persons adjusted themselves to what seemed to him pathological human conditions.
Laing tended to romanticize mental disorders. The relevant point, however, is that normal persons do not seem acutely aware of the valuelessness, meaningless and purposelessness of being and therefore do not use their imaginations to construct imaginary worth, meaning and purpose for themselves. Indeed, some normal persons are even convinced that their bodies have worth. Some women, for example, take pride in their sexual organs and sexual activities; activities that give such sensitive souls as St Paul the impression that only lower human being could engage in them. As Paul saw it, the things of flesh ought to be repulsive to highly evolved human beings.
Normal human beings enjoy their food whereas the sensitive mind wonders why he must kill animals and tree and eat them to stay alive, to survive to become food for other forms of life.
Life on earth is a vicious struggle by animals to survive, in the struggle, the stronger eat the weak. And what do they live for?

SANITY
Suppose the neurotic and or psychotic person who pursues imaginary worth, meaning and purpose accepts the reality that his self has no worth, meaning and purpose, what would happen?
He would be freed from his psychological compulsions to seem what he is not. He would feel emptied of all illusions of worth, meaning and purpose. Devoid of the false baggage of personal value, meaning and purpose, he would feel able to live and do whatever he is able to-do with his life, provided that his goals are doable and are within the realities of space, time, matter and energy.
Matter, space and time limit what human beings can or cannot do. If they limit themselves to what is doable in space and time, they are realistic; if they dream of doing what those physical realities cannot accommodate, they are idealistic and bound to fail in achieving their goals.
Instead of wishing for abstract states that would never come into being, the realistic individual uses his thinking to understand how the empirical world works and studies science and devices technology to cope with the exigencies of his empirical world. He does not escape into idealistic, abstract make belief worlds that will never come into being.
The realistic individual sees his ego, his sense of separated self, the I, as an illusion since it is bound to disappear with the death of his body. The self seem a product of experience in body and dies with the body.
The disappearance of the ego false self, however, does not mean that there is not a permanent life force operative in the universe. What seems to live outside body and survive the demise of the human body is life itself. Hinduism and Buddhism construe life as undifferentiated self; one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.
Obviously life, at least in human beings, does think and behave. There is no reason to believe that thinking and behavior would end after physical death.

HINDUISM’S DREAM ANALOGY

When the individual gives up all the illusions of the ego, he appreciates that our life on earth is like a life in a dream. Dream activities seem real to dreamers but when they wake up they realize that what is done in dreams have not been done in the real world. Human egos and bodies are dream figures and their activities on earth are dream activities, Hinduism tells us.
The realistic individual learns to overlook what is done in dreams; to overlook is to forgive the seeming evil all people committed.
What are done in dreams is neither good nor bad, therefore, they ought to be overlooked, forgiven.
The forgiving person walks this world peacefully and happily. He is always smiling and laughing, for, to him, life on earth and what we do on earth seem mirthful, humorous. Just think of people having sex and see how ridiculous they seem. A realistic approach to this world must elicit laughter rather than seriousness. Life on earth is a comedy (and a tragedy if you take it seriously, as neurotics and psychotics do).

INFERIROITY AND SUPERIORITY

Alfred Adler (1911) pointed out that some children feel intensely inferior and compensate with pursuit of fictional superiority. He speculated that biological and social deficits predispose such children to feel inordinately inadequate and hate and reject their bodies and attempt to restitute with imaginary, all powerful, superior selves.
Adler did not convince us what the biological deficits are, but there is no doubt that he made an accurate observation that some people feel inferior and compensates with pursuit of false superiority. He called such persons neurotic (contemporary psychiatry has differentiated Adler’s global neurotic into the various nosological categories in psychiatric diagnostic manuals).
Karen Horney replaced Adler’s terms with her own. Where Adler employed superiority she employed ideal. To Horney, the neurotic hates and rejects his real self and seeks to become an ideal self. The ideal self is a mental construct and is not the real self. To Horney, the neurotic attempts to actualize the imaginary, the ideal self. As such, he is trying to translate fantasy into reality.
The neurotic is very proud to be his ideal self. The ideal self is his handiwork, his idol and he is proud of it and defends it. Alas, he is proud of an illusory, non-existent self; he uses the various ego defense mechanisms to defend an illusory, non-existent self, hence he is insane.
Helen Schulman (1976) gives the writings of Adler and Horney a spiritual coloration. She calls psychoanalysis’ neurotic the ego; in her psycho-spiritual system, the ego seeks to realize itself. Since the ego was invented by thinking, the mind, it is not real and cannot be actualized in the real world. Schuman urges people to give up pursuit of the ego and embrace their real self, a self she, along with Hinduism and Buddhism, believes is undifferentiated self.

INSANITY

The insane person, be he neurotic or psychotic, hates and rejects his real self and seeks to become an idealized superior self. His real self comprises of his body and ego; he believes that that real self, body and its I, the ego, is worthless, meaningless and purposeless.
The insane person rejects the real self and its real world and postulates an alternative ideal self and ideal world and pursues them. In seeking to realize his imaginary ideal states he obtains fictional worth, meaning and purpose. He is pursuing the imaginary and therefore cannot attain them hence he is insane.
Insanity is seeking to make the unreal real, seeking to make the ego ideal real when it cannot be real.
Sanity lies in relinquishing pursuit of the false ideal self-concept, false ideal self-image and false ideal personality and accepting the truth of human existence on earth, imperfection.
Buddhism helps us understand how the false can be given up and replaced with the real self. Let us, therefore, explore the nature of Buddhism.


BUDDHISM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NO-SEPARATED SELF

Buddhism, properly considered, is not only a religion but a psychology, a science of thinking and behaving that realistically acknowledges God but does not make much ado about him.
In Buddhism’s meditation, the goal is to attain no-separated self. On earth, each of us believes that he has a separated self and acts as such. The separated self, the self concept, the self image, the human personality, Buddhism wants to get rid of.
Buddhism believes that the separated self is not real, that it is a chimera, a smokescreen hiding our real self, which it believes is unified life. The goal of Buddhism is to eliminate the separated self so as to experience the real self.
In meditation, the individual is encouraged to give up his attachment to his separated self concept…the separated self is always conceptual. He actively negates the separated self concept that he is consciously aware of. He denies that he is his self concept, self image and personality. He denies that the thinking of his separated ego self is his real thinking. He negates all conceptual thinking. Every thought that enters his mind is seen as part of ego thinking, hence not his real thinking and denied as true. Neti, Neti, not this, not this, he tells himself (Hinduism does the same).
The goal is to deny the reality of the conceptual self and its conceptual thinking. It is hoped that at some point the individual attains inner silence. As it were, his mind is emptied of all ego separated thinking. He is now like a void, a blank slate, wiped clean of all earthly thinking.
It is said that when the individual attains this state of emptiness, void, no self, no conceptual thinking, that he may escape from the temporal world and enter into what Buddha called Nirvana (Zen Buddhism calls it Satori and Hinduism calls it Samadhi). In that state, the individual is no longer aware of his self as a separated self but knows himself as part of one unified self/one unified life, an undifferentiated life.
In unified state, the individual is not this or that person, not this or that animal, not this or that thing; he is nothing, no thing in particular. Since no-thing is everything, the individual is part of everything. He is part of one universal life.
In unified life, there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object.
However, there is still some individuality in the universal self. It is one self that is simultaneously infinite selves. All the infinite selves know themselves as part of the one self and as in it, as it is in them; they are in each other.
There is no space or gap between one self and another self, all are joined, connected and unified.
All selves share one self; all share one thinking and share one mind.
In unified self is perfect peace and happiness, bliss really. Conflict can only arise where there is separated selves, where there is disharmony.

THINKING AND BEHAVING FROM THE REAL SELF

Clearly, the goal of Buddhism is to eliminate the separated self and attain unified self. In the unified self is said to be peace and joy.
Buddhists try not to think and speak from their separated ego selves. Of course, like all human beings, they are living out of their separated selves and think and act from them. To be on planet earth, a separated place, the individual must have a separated self housed in body. But Buddhists try to rise above that separated self.
Buddhists believe that the separated self is not who they are; they believe that the separated self is a false self and that whatever it says is, ip so facto, false. They, therefore, try very hard not to think, talk and behave from the separated self. Instead of saying anything that comes to their mind, they pause and wonder whether the thought is ego related and if the answer is yes they keep quiet and do not say it. They smile and talk less.
The Buddhist tendency to try not to speak from the ego, the separated self, is probably why Oriental persons, by and large, tend to operate at a higher intellectual level than other groups of human beings.

Thinking requires that there be a thinker, a separated self that does the thinking. If you there is no separated self, there would be no thinker.
When people die, their separated selves die and there are no more selves in them that think, hence their thinking ceases.
Without thinking, the world ceases to exist for the dead. Hinduism and Buddhism extrapolates from this reality that our world is like a dream and that those in it think in a certain manner. When they awaken from that dream, they no longer think in the manner they did while they were dreaming. The world they had seen while in dream ceases being. They awaken to a different self and a different world. They awaken to unified self and unified world with unified thinking, a mode of thinking that those in our world cannot understand.
Those in the unified mode of existence do not know that our separated mode of existence exists. God as God, unified self, does not know that our world exists. The son of God, as his father created him, unified with God and all his brothers, Christ, does not know that our world exists.
It is only when the son of God sleeps and dreams that he is who he is not, special separated self who created himself, created his father and brothers that he sees himself in the perceptual world, a false world. Of course, in reality he did not create himself or his brothers or his father; God created him.
Our illusion is the belief that we created ourselves, when, in fact we are created by God; the whole produced the part; the part did not produce the whole. As long as the son of God sleeps and dreams that he is separated from his father and brothers and is in the world of space, time and matter, his father enters his dream as the Holy Spirit and guides him towards real self realization, teaches him to remember his real self, unified self. He teaches him how to do so, through forgiveness and love.
In meditation, when the individual tunes out our world, our world literally no longer exists for him; he escaped to a unified world that does not understand that our world exists. The vibrational energy of the unified world is higher than the speed of light, the most our world’s vibrations, speed, and movement can attain.

THE EGO IS FULL OF FALSE OPINIONS

The ego self is flippant and has superficial understanding of things. Any one who talks out of his ego generally is glib and not deep. Africans, for example, by and large, talk mostly from their ego selves. Because they live mostly from their shallow ego selves their actions generally do not exhibit much thought. They speak whatever comes to their minds and do not pause to ask whether they are speaking from the ego or from their real selves.
As Horney pointed out, the neurotic ego is almost always proud. Whoever speaks and behaves from his ego self is almost always a proud person. Proud persons are almost always childish persons.
Whatever is said from pride standpoint is seldom the truth. To search and know the truth, even empirical truth, the individual must relinquish his ego and its false pride.

The separated self, the ego is full of opinions about everything. It readily proffers opinions on every topic, whether it knows what it is talking about or not is bedsides the point. It just wants to have opinions on things.
The ego has opinion on which the individual is, who other people are, what things in nature are and what life is all about. None of these opinions accurately represent the truth of anything.
The fact is that the individual (as an ego, a separated self) does not know who he is, does not know who other people are and does not know what anything means. Opinions are not facts, particularly, if they are based on lack of empirical study of the nature of things.
On the other hand, when a person learns to speak and act less from his ego stand point, he tends to be less opinionated. Unfortunately, the individual may not want to be less opinionated, for it would seem that if he has no opinions he does not exist.
What actually makes the ego feel that it exists is that it has opinions on everything in its world. If it did not have those opinions, it would not exist, as it, in fact, does not exist.
Wanting to seem to exist, the separated self feels compelled to have opinions, even if they are false. (Having no opinions gives the individual peace and happiness.)
The ego is full of itself. The person who is mindful that he is not an ego tends not to be full of himself; he tends to be less opinionated.
The realistic individual accepts that he does not know who he is, who other people are and what anything means. Therefore, instead of proffering an empty opinion, he keeps quite.
This helps account for Buddhists tendency to just keep quiet rather than talk too much and be opinionated. Orientals, Buddhists tend to be less opinionated, whereas egotistical Africans are full of opinions, false views of reality.
The prideful egotists talks to make noise; he expresses opinions so that he may seem to exist when, in fact, the ego does not exist and his opinions are false.
It is generally better if the individual kept quite rather than open his mouth and talked rubbish.


THE EGO IS VERY JUDGMENTAL

The separated self, the ego is very judgmental. It posits an ideal ego and from its standpoint, judges reality: the constructor of the ego, the individual, is now judged by his ego; the son of God, the inventor of the ego false self, judges himself through the standpoint of his ego ideal; the ego judges the individual, other people and everything it sees.
All the ego’s judgments are based on its understanding of what is ideal. The ego’s ideal is a mental construct, a conceptual idea and not rooted in the world of empirical reality. The ego identifying person uses his merely abstract, mental constructs of how human beings and things ought to be to judge actual human beings and things.
Obviously, ego judgmental behavior is a mistake, for reality does not fit the fictions invented by the ego mind.
Judgments produce enormous pain and suffering for the judge and those judged. To judge is really to attack the person or thing being judged, it is to say that it ought not to be the way it is and ought to become different, become as the judge, the ego ideal thinks that it ought to become.
To judge is to seek to destroy what is judged and make it become as the judge wants it to become. To judge is to play god and want reality to be as one wish it be.
In Helen Schucman’s terms, to judge is to attack the Son of God, ones real self and other people. Whoever attacks the son has attacked the father. To judge people as not good enough relative to ones ego ideal, is to Judge God as not good enough relative to ones ego ideal.
To judge is to attempt to replace reality, God, ones real self, things, with ones idea of how reality ought to become. The ego declared war on reality, war on how things are and wants to convert them how it wants them to become: ego ideals.
To judge is to declare war on the person and or thing judged, hence to inflict pain on him. The judgmental ego is at war with reality, with God and his children and is inflicting pain on them.
It follows that to stop inflicting pain on people one must stop judging them as either good or bad relative to ones ego ideals. One must stop ones war on oneself. Judgment saps people’s energy and tires them.
If one stopped all judgment, one would become peaceful, relaxed and happy. One also makes those one do not judge, other people, peaceful and happy, for one is no longer attacking and inflicting pain on them.

To not judge, one must detach from the ego and identify with a non judgmental self, the unified self.
Buddhists struggle to detach from the ego and are usually less judgmental human beings. They are not attacking reality, they are not inflicting pain on themselves and their fellow human beings hence they tend to be more at peace with their world. Buddhist cultures are most peaceful and loving cultures on earth.
It seems that Buddhism and its aims are conducive to making human beings more peaceful and happy. The pursuit of no-separated self seem the best path to attaining inner and outer peace and happiness.


HOW BUDDHISM CAME ABOUT, GAUTAMA BUDDHA

There are many stories of how Buddhism came about. These are exactly that, stories and mythologies. One is not interested in myths but in facts.
What I will do is extrapolate from the myths surrounding Buddha the truth about him. There was a man called Gautama Sakayamuni. He was from the middle class. He was married and had a son. He was given to introspection and philosophical reflection. He wondered what life was all about. Apparently, he could not quite figure life out and left his home to go search for the truth.
He wandered about and joined many Hindu sects to learn about the truth. He listened to many Sadhus, Hindu holy men, teach their variations of Hinduism. He tried several paths to the truth and found no answer to his question.
Frustrated, he attempted Raja Yoga., meditation. (Hinduism has much Yoga, such as Jnana, Bhakti, Raja, Karma, and Tantra, see Patanjali’s Yogas.) He sat under a Bo tree and told himself that he is going to stop thinking and just sit there until he gets answers to his questions or else that he would not get up. He decided to sit there and, if need be, die rather than get up and live without knowing why he is living. He went for broke.
Until a person unequivocally throws himself one hundred percent to doing something, he tends not to succeed at doing it. People claim to seek unity with God, but want to retain their separated egos. It is only the few who extinguish their separated selves and do not want anything to do with it and its world, our world, that experience unified state, aka God.
In his meditative state, he was given many reasons why he should live in this world. The ego provides him, as it provides all of us, reasons why we should live on earth. The usual reasons are presented: Sex, there are many nubile damsels that the young man could have sex with. But Buddha said nope to that, for he recognized that sex is a ridiculous activity, a desire that when it seizes one, one pursues it as if ones life depends on it, but after ejaculation one asks: what was that all about? Sex is an irritant to the thoughtful man, an addiction that ought to be overcome, rather than given in to.
How about power and wealth? Those are ephemeral and transitory. The rich and powerful of today are not remembered a thousand years from today.
The young Gautama was not impressed by women’s bodies, wealth and power. The man was tempted by Maya, Mara, and the force that makes this world desirable to us and maintains our stay in this world and did not succumb to it.
Five hundred years later, another young man, Emmanuel Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus the Christ, was similarly tested and, he, too, refused to give in to the temptations of the ego and flesh. It seems that those who want to overcome the ego and its world of flesh must be tempted in assorted ways; only the few with the courage to not give in to temptation to be separated ego self succeed.
Buddha refused to bite and take the bait to live as a separated ego, to live a meaningless and purposeless existence on earth, a life, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth discovered, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. We are, indeed, like actors on a stage enacting weird scripts, pursuing false worth, meaning and purpose but in the end as another Shakespearean Character, Hamlet, observed, food for worms.
(At age nine, I concluded that my life, your life, our lives on earth, is worthless, meaningless and purposeless. Like other thoughtful players in this insane drama, I sought to make it worthwhile, meaningful and purposeful by pursuing the path of understanding, Jnana yoga, science and philosophy.)
Buddha just sat there, cross legged, not eating, not drinking, not talking to any one, and willing to die if he is not shown the truth of human existence.
If you are falling off a cliff and desire to live, you will be afraid of death; but if you do not care to live, you would joyfully fall to your death or land on your feet. Gautama embraced death and did not care for meaningless ego living.
At some point, he escaped from our ego separated awareness and entered nirvana, to unified life. Nirvana is total bliss. He lived in total bliss, peace and happiness with his face shinning with the light of peace (what some people call aura, the bliss reflected on the face of those who have relinquished the ego and its turmoil and attained eternal oneness with all being).
In Nirvana, Samadhi and Satori and mystical union, one has a choice to make: to keep being in it; in which case ones body would drop dead, or to return to ones body and use that body to teach other people that there is another mode of living that is peaceful and happy.
Buddha opted to return to his body, to the ego and to this world and subsequently use them to teach human beings how to live in peace.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS AND THE PATH TO THEM

Buddha taught his followers that we live on earth because we DESIRE to live separated lives. Life on earth is due to desire for separation.
Separation has a goal: to go make the separated self seem real. What is real is our unified self, but we want to go make its opposite, separated self, seem real.
In Hindu terms, we cast a magical spell, Maya, on us and seem to sleep and in sleep, dream see a separated world.
This world, the material universe, is a product of our desire for separation. That desire, separation, led to the formation of space, time and matter, all to make our seeming separated selves real to us. In space and time, each of us houses himself in body and sees gap between him and others and takes time before he reaches other people. Separation seems real to us, but is so because we want it to be real; what we desire and believe is possible is what we see in our world; wishing and believing produces what is seen.
As long as we desire separated selves, Buddha says that we must SUFER. For one thing, to make separated self seem possible, we housed ourselves in bodies; body is vulnerable and prone to pain. Those who live in body must experience pain; to be pained is to suffer. Therefore, to live on earth is to suffer.
We suffer because we are living as the opposite of our real selves. Our real selves are unified and we prefer to live as separated selves.
In effect, we attacked our true self, unified self, holy self; we attacked reality and seem to split it into fragments and each fragment, each of us, thinks him self separated from other fragments. As Helen Schucman wrote in her Christological rendition of Buddhism and Hinduism, A Course in miracles, we attacked union, which is what religions call God; we attacked God and see ourselves as separated from him. The part (human beings) sees itself separated from the whole (God).
That attack on our whole self inflicts pain and suffering on us. To live on earth is to inflict pain and suffering on ones self.
To live on earth is to desire separation from God, which is to suffer. Gautama recognized that to eliminate suffering that one must give up its source.
Desire for separated self is the cause of suffering; therefore, give up desire for separated self and you return to unified self, in which there is no suffering.
But if one gave up the separated self, one would return to living in total formlessness, spirit, hence exit this world.
We do not want to give up our separated ego selves, die and leave this world. Okay, Buddha said to us: go ahead and desire the things of this world but do so with detachment. See the ego and its entire world as transitory and ephemeral; desire them but recognize that they come and go and are not permanent.
What is permanent and changeless is the real self, the unified spirit self. As long as we live on earth, in the world of separation, space, time and matter we must have some desire, for separated self and its world, for it is desire to live here that keeps us here.
Okay, go ahead and have desire to be a separated human being, but use your separated self to care for all separated selves, for they are literally part of our one unified self.
Aware of our true self as unified self, that other people share our self, Buddha taught compassion, love and forgiveness for all human beings.

THE CONDITIONS FOR PEACE AND HAPPINESS

Do you want to be peaceful and happy? If yes, Buddha asks you to forgive and love all the people; indeed, to love all the animals and trees. Why do so?
One life manifests in all biological life forms. We are all, literally, one life and what we do to others we do to ourselves.
Giving is receiving. Since other people are you, what you do to them you do to yourself, what you give to other people you give to yourself.
In our world, we believe that we are separated into discrete selves. In that world, other people are more likely to do to you as you do to them. If you love other people, hence join them and in so doing give them peace and joy, they would love you and in so doing give you peace and joy.
Peace and joy inheres only in union, in joining with all people. On the other hand, if you hate other people, give them tension; they will hate you and give you tension.
Buddha taught the four noble truths and the eight paths to them. To live on earth is to suffer; suffering is caused by desire to live as separated ego selves; to eliminate suffering, one must stop desiring separated existence and since that is impossible if one still wants to live in this world, one must desire things with detachment, desire them but do not feel disappointed if you do not get them, and if you get them do not feel disappointed when they leave you.
One must live the truth of oneness: forgive and love all; one must talk the truth at all times and refuse to give in to talking from the ego and its prideful lies (calculated to make one seem important).
The Buddha taught people to live a highly compassionate, social serving existence; a compassionate person is a person who identifies with human suffering, albeit self induced; he is generally a moral person. Buddhists tend to be very moral human beings.

Buddha set up monasteries where monks lived and meditated, so as to attain their real selves hence experience peace and happiness. He urged his monks to be detached from the things of this world, to dress in simple robes and work and beg for their food (begging humiliates the prideful ego and makes one feel humble, a precondition for experiencing unified life).
Buddha lived to old age, eighty. His disciples continued his teaching and spread from his native northern India to other parts of Asia.
As they spread out to other lands, their teachings took on the coloration of the local cultures they were living in. In Tibet, for example, certain already existing Tibetan views on God entered Buddhism. In China and later Japan, the people’s marshal spirit entered Buddhism to form Cheng, Zen Buddhism and its upshot, Samurai.
Religion, sooner or latter is corrupted and bastardized by the surrounding culture it operates in; religions fit what people want them to become. Generally, only a few persons truly understand the true import of religion, our efforts to reconnect to our source, to the source we seem separated from.

Buddhism is religion, philosophy and psychology in one piece. An American poet and clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman resurrected the true teachings of Buddha and cast it in Christological language, a form that she hopes would appeal to apostate Christians who could not accept traditional Christianity but could accept Buddhism, if cast in the Christian language that they are used to. (I studied Hinduism and Buddhism and fell in love with them. Later, my attention was drawn to Helen Schucman’s book and I read it. I marveled at her ability to translate what Hinduism and Buddhism had taught me into Christian terms. She was probably one of the best religious thinkers of the twentieth century.)


My own function is to cast Buddhism in prose and in non-religious language. I hope that in doing so, it would appeal to scientists.
Ultimately, the end of all teachers of union is the same. No matter what form the teaching takes, the goal is to help people eliminate their attachment to the separated self and live through their real self, unified self. When people live out of their real unified self, they tend to experience peace and happiness.
We cannot live as unified self while on earth, a separated place, but we can approximate it. To the extent that we approximate it, we live in peace and joy.
To the extent that a human being sees that separated self is an illusion and gives it up and live out of his true self, unified self, he tends to be happy and peaceful. Therefore, we must find a way to teach the psychology of no separated self.

CONCLUSION

Human beings suffer because they have the illusion that they have separated ego selves and live out of them. Each of them posits a special separated self, an important (and in neurosis and psychosis, superior) separated self.
They pursue a chimera that does not even exist, or that seems to exist only in a dream setting.
In awake state, what exists is our joined and unified self, God and Christ, one self with infinites parts, all of whom are it and it is all of them. In unified state, the individual is calm, quiet, peaceful, happy, non judgmental, non critical, not proud, forgiving and loving.
If somehow the individual convinces himself that his separated special self is an illusion, a dream self that seems real while he dreams but is not real when he wakens, he saves himself a lot of mental and emotional upsets. If one has no self, one would not be prone to feeling fear, anger, depression, paranoia, and other mental and emotional upsets. If one has no separated self, one would not be defensive, for there would be no self to defend.
Only the false self needs to be defended to seem real; the real self, unified self is inclusive of everything and everything does not need to defend itself from other things for nothing is an other from it.
Such a person would not experience anger, for there is no other person to attack and make him feel angry; he would not experience fear for there is no self to be fearful. He would be calm at most times.
Pursuit of the ideal self is escape from reality. It is childish refusal to deal with reality as it is. Such a person concentrates on becoming the imaginary self that he has no time to deal with the exigencies of the real world he finds himself in. He finds the real world unpalatable and negates it and escapes into fantasyland. In his idealism, he is a king and shapes the world to fit his wishes, but in the real world, he is a pauper.
The dreamy, idealist does deal with the exigencies of the real world. In the meantime, he is poor. If only he stopped idealizing and dealt with reality as it is he would be able to figure out what his interests and aptitudes are and what skill sets the job market requires, train for them and make a decent living in the temporal universe.
Having escape from the real world, he generally wounds up depending on other people to support him. In the West, he goes on public assistance, in societies with extended families; he depends on his family members, his wife and children to support him. He sits around wasting his mental energies wishing for how things ought to become rather than dealing with them as they really are.
Insanity lies in believing that one has a separated special self, a self concept, self image and personality one made for ones self and for other people and attempt to become it. Sanity lies in accepting the truth that the separated self, ordinary or superior, does not exist, is a figure in the dream of life on earth, and accepting the truth of our unified self. We all share one life, a life that is formless, unified, the same and equal everywhere and eternal.
Do you want to live a peaceful and happy life? If you relinquish your presumed separated self special, superior and accept equal, same unified self; do not give in to the temptation to speak or behave from separated self; always strive to do what serves social interest, to forgive and love all human beings, you would be peaceful and happy.
I cannot speak for you or any other human being. I can only speak for me for I am only responsible for my thinking and behaviors.
While in college, I accepted that my body and ego were worthless, meaningless and purposeless. I considered myself an existentialist thinker ala my then hero, Jean Paul Sartre. But latter in life, I learned that whereas my earthly body and its ego activities are still worthless, meaningless and purposeless that our unified spirit self has real worth, meaning and purpose.
I strive to live out of my unified self. Of course, I have an ego separated self, a prideful self, but I know it for what it is, a false self and try to over come it through love for our shared one self. To the extent that I succeed, which is seldom the case, I feel peace and joy that, as St Paul observed, passes human ego understanding.
Find out for yourself whether this is the truth or not. You do not have to believe anything on faith; just practice egoless living, forgiving, loving and social service and see whether you would not experience peace, happiness and material abundance in your sojourn on earth.


ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org