Quotes from Polly Young-Eisendrath

Because Buddhism presents a spiritual argument for the transformation (not the medication) of suffering, as well as specific and systematic methods of analyzing subjective distress, it now assists me in being able to address audiences about the principles and uses of analytic psychotherapy.

Help your children to see and notice poverty and differences in privilege that seem inhumane and unfair. Do this in a way that does not increase guilt or shame for what you have as a family, but rather helps them see their responsibility for sharing with others and keeping others in mind.

T]he formless self is free from all suffering even as it compassionately 'takes on' the suffering of all.

At a first glance, medical psychology seems to have nothing to do with religion. But at its depth it provides a new, though at the same time primordial, perspective on what should be the subject matter of religion. It is both a criticism and an approval of religion. It is in and through the soul that problems of the world reveal themselves as world problems.

For students coming to meditation practice with faulty ego functioning, the enlightenment ideal may mistakenly represent 'a purified state of complete and invulnerable self-sufficiency from which all badness has been expelled, the aim of all narcissistic strivings

Dogen maintains that self and other are ultimately interdependent; the self does not exist prior to, or outside of, the other; we only have the possibility of experiencing self or other through relationship.

To be mortal means to die, and both Eve and Pandora bring death into the world. This is a curious rerversal of the fact that women bring life into the world, but it says something about the meaning of 'woman' within a religion dominated by male gods.

In our normal, everyday forms of consciousness, we suffer form what [William] James calls a 'lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self.' Insofar as the self that encases the seed of a wider consciousness like a husk is seen as 'conventionally healthy,' cracking it open to uncover the higher part leaves the individual exposed to neurosis; but then, as James reminds us and as Jung himself knew, this may well be the chief condition for receptivity to these higher realms.

Asian philosophy and culture never endured an intellectual upheaval like the Cartesian split of mind and body that brought the so-called Enlightenment to the West. The consequent achievements of scientific method and the less fortunate by-products of secular self-interest together laid the groundwork, in Europe and America, for the personal psychology of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.

S]urely the mysterious inner world of the psyche as such still offers an important forum where religions can meet, leaving their dogmas at the door, and pursue together the elusive quest for a common humanity that transcends religious differences.

W]hat would be more reliable than the East and the West? Perhaps a concept of the world, the universe, or the cosmos. Our age can be characterized by the growing consciousness of the world as a whole. Our historical era is in essence cosmological.

Everything in the cosmos now proves to be relative. Nothing is autonomous in itself. All things in the world betray their interdependence with each other. Metaphysics ceases to be an abstract system of thought and becomes an experiential reality. Not beings in the world but the world itself comes to be questioned.

Awareness of the existence of oneself leads to a crisis in which one's being-in-the-world is fundamentally questioned. One's existence, however, is not simply denied. Instead, one faces the basic fact that one is responsible for one's relations to all humans and other beings through one's acts.

We are still too much a part of the story of what is happening to religious consciousness to assess its meaning.

Today the mind has taken a turn towards an organic interconnectedness among all things in the apparent attempt to restore something in self-awareness that had been lost in classical scientific method and religious orthodoxy.

We are still a long way from having sorted out wild conjecture from reasonable hypothesis in the maelstrom of ideas. Meantime, it has become irrevocably clear that there are whole blocks of experience that do not fit received patterns and may require new paradigms of mind.

Suffering from feelings of inner emptiness, some meditation practitioners may misunderstand and likewise be attracted to the Buddhist notion of 'no-self,' and mistakenly seek doctrinal validation for their feelings of emptiness.

The goal in meditation is not to exorcise the psyche of disturbing thoughts and emotions, nor to suppress them, but to hold them in non-reactive, friendly awareness. They may not necessarily disappear from the practitioner's psyche, but through consistent observing and witnessing of them, they cease to trouble him or her.

When a wide variety of mental processes are treated with bare, non-judgmental attention, they are held in an open, spacious container. This enables the meditation practitioner to befriend his or her thoughts and emotions, no matter what they are, and reduces the likelihood of being tyrannized by an inordinately demanding superego