Convention, Conflict and Liberation: Further Observations on Asian Psychology and Modern Psychiatry

When we compare some of the trends in modern psychotherapy with certain practical disciplines of Asian philosophy, we begin to discover a most instructive clarification of the whole function of therapy, and especially of its relation to social institutions. Among social institutions we must understand conventions of every type; not only the family, marriage, legal codes, and systems of language, but also ideas of motion, time, space and personality which are generally understood to be properties of the physical world rather than conventions of social origin.* But it would seem that the rigorous procedures of mathematics and physics are confirming the intuition of Indian and Chinese thinkers as to the essentially conventional character of our conceptions of the physical world.

In Indian philosophy the world as we conceive it is termed maya—a much misunderstood word derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, “to measure,” and from which we have in turn derived such words as meter, matrix, and material. Stated rather baldly, the theory of maya is that the world as we conceive it is a mental construct as distinct from an “objective” reality. This is not to be confused with Western views of subjective idealism. It is rather the more easily verifiable notion that the world as we conceive it (e.g., as a multiplicity of “things” in relative motion) is not to be identified with the world as it is, in the same way that one does not identify the measure with what is measured. One does not confuse the cloth with the yard, since it would be impossible to make clothing from merely abstract yards. Thus a person is said to be spellbound by maya when he confuses the concrete with the abstract, when he is hypnotized into believing that the world of immediate experience is precisely the system of concepts (vikalpa) and measures which he employs to manipulate that world, and to make reconstructions of it in terms of the symbols of thought. These concepts and measures are our social instituti