Oriental traditions

The first missionaries to reach American soil probably arrived from the East, to attend conferences hosted by liberal Christians. Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902) left a favorable impression on the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. He stayed around to start the Vedanta Society. Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in 1920 to attend a conference and stayed to establish the Self-Realization Fellowship. The silent, self-avowed avatar Meher Baba came in the early 1930s, adding his voice to the ancient wisdom’s refrain: “Philosophers, atheists and others may affirm or refute the existence of God, but as long as they do not deny the existence of their own being they continue to testify to their belief in God—for I tell you, with divine authority that God is Existence, eternal and infinite. He is EVERYTHING” (Baba 1976, 13)

These earlier figures came to America to pave the way and to set the stage for the major invasion that would come in the 1960s. Oriental traditions have influenced all the avenues leading up to the formation of the New Age movement.

All of these predecessors of the New Age movement contributed to the counterculture’s need for an alternative to the spiritless secularism of Western culture. The decade between 1960 and 1970 gave the hippy movement its most formative influences.

Zen Buddhism was the inspirational focus of disenfranchised beats of the fifties. It was the final movement of major significance before the sixties’ explosion. Zen had a lot of appeal to the disenchanted Westerner. Like Buddhism in general, Zen was unconcerned about the existence of deities. It was just what the Western secular psyche wanted: a religion that wasn’t a religion. Zen was implicitly a critique of the vain busyness of Western culture, because Zen itself was in essence a critique of the vanity of life—the futility of all desire and striving that in the end must come to nothing. Sounds like King Solomon: all is vanity.

Zen was sassy and cynical; its simplicity verged on the ridiculous: “Eat when hungry, sleep when tired.” Yet this simple admonition embodies the Zen spirit that cut through the complexities of the contemporary world, the hype and hustle of modern life, recapturing the exhilaration of living fully in the moment. For the beats whose future was despair, Zen Buddhism and its ecstasy of the moment was a seductive philosophy, indeed.

The sixties counterculture, or hippies, found their mystical vision already in place, thanks to the beats of the fifties. The dismay and despair of the hippies was not much different than the beats’. There was at least one big difference overall; the counterculture became a mass movement and practically turned the world upside-down. Then too, the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, especially LSD, was a major mode of initiation into that subculture. The psychedelic experience was connected to the enlightened consciousness of the mystics. Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley were two of the major propagandists who “led” the hippies into the psychedelic experience. Richard Alpert later disagreed with the idea of drug induced enlightenment and set out on more traditional paths to bliss. He eventually went to India to learn the traditional way and in the process became a guru himself under the name of Ram Dass. He became one of the more effective popularizers of the mystical vision.

During this time many others went to the Orient to find the way, but for those who didn’t go, India came to them. In the sixties and early seventies, gurus from the East inundated our shores. Unlike American missionaries going abroad, those gurus who came over here had the American Freedom of Religion to help them spread their “enlightenment”. With the help of the American media, they successfully spread the message of humanity’s godhood and popularized the techniques traditionally used for achieving it: meditation and Yoga.

Native-American religion and neopaganism

Carlos Castaneda brought native-American shamanism out in the open, stirring up an interest in their rituals and rites. In his 1968 book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, he described a fantastic world of power animals, places of power, and spirit guides. Castaneda painted a universe that was far more interesting that contemplating the mystical void, simply because it was inhabited.

But Castaneda’s sorcery was only one of the traditions oriented to the earth. Neopaganism was a natural attraction to a generation longing to return to the purity and simplicity of Mother Nature. It had begun to emerge in the 1970s and by the decade’s end, it had exploded into a full-blown revival and became the religion of choice for the ecologically minded and many spiritually inclined radical feminists.


Humanistic and transpersonal psychology

Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and others, represented a new breed of psychologists who sought an alternative to the psychological orthodoxies of the day. Freudian psychoanalysis made humanity a victim of instinct and social conditioning; Skinnerian behavioralism made it a pawn in an environment of biological stimulus/response. Maslow and other pioneers of humanistic psychology claim they wanted to restore human dignity. But what they offered was a psychology that glorified the self. It also claimed that peoples’ impulses were essentially good, affirmed the unfathomable depths of human potential, and stood by personal growth as an individual’s highest goal.

Of all the theories of counseling and psychotherapy, person-centered psychology represents the humanistic spirit in contemporary psychology. And certainly no single individual caught the essence better than its founder, Carl Rogers. It says that the client, not the therapist, should be at the center of therapy (hence it is person-centered). According to this theory only the client has the resources to recognize and then remove obstacles to his or her personal growth. Because it emphasizes the importance of the individual, it is often criticized for contributing to modern narcissi.

Rogers had a profound respect for the client’s perception of reality, since this inner reality was ultimately the means for promoting growth in the individual. Rogers is dogmatic in saying that experience is the ultimate authority in life: “. . . it is to experience that I must return again and again; to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience” [Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Houghton Mifflin, 1961).

The core assertion of this personality theory is that there is but one motivational force for all humanity: the tendency toward self-actualization. Every one has a natural intent to develop their capacities to the maximum, in ways that will either enhance their own well-being, or at least maintain it. Actualization is the realization of our potential, which includes the capacity to love. Self-actualization is not selfishness. Profound narcissism is actually one sign of failure to actualize one’s potential.

While self-actualization produces the movement, the direction for the movement comes from the organismic valuing process — an ability to choose that which will enhance us and reject that which does not. The actualization drive creates in us an urge for fulfillment, and the organismic valuing process tells us what will provide that fulfillment. This process is presumed to be an infallible instinctive compass or guide for choice and action.

“What is the ideal course for human development, according to the person-centered therapy? The child, although blessed with a drive toward actualization and an inerrant organismic valuing process to guide her, still needs the acceptance and positive regard of her parents. If the parents have provided this positive regard unconditionally, the child grows up always aware of her natural urges and awareness (self-experience). As consciousness of self emerges, she will begin to define herself (self-concept) in accord with her own experience of herself and not in terms of how others see her or expect her to be. Further, she has no aspirations to be other than what she is, and her ideal self, the perception of what she should be, then perfectly matches the self-concept which in turn perfectly matches the self-experience.

“The healthy person then is one who has an intact and functioning organismic valuing process and who completely trusts the valuing process. That person is fully aware, honest, personally satisfied and spontaneous. Health reflects trust of self, openness to experiencing and existential living in the present. Ideally, this will lead to a new kind of freedom whereby the person chooses to direct his or her life from within rather than go by the dictates of the external world.”

As we develop and mature, it is our self-concept that increasingly shapes and directs the organismic valuing process. Thus, a self-concept unpolluted by distortions caused by other persons’ judgments allows the organismic valuing process to continue to operate as an infallible guide.

I wonder how many “ideal” clients Rogers had, few of us got through childhood so “undisturbed”. Most of us grew up under conditions: we were expected to act in obedience with the expectations of parents, rather than by our own instincts, in order to receive acceptance. In fact, we were loved conditionally.

For Rogers, Christian discipline and instruction is a prime example of disrespect for the child’s self-directedness. The child is confronted with the need to deny aspects of his experience and act according to rules or judgments of authority figures. He then develops an ideal self, dictated by parental wishes, which does not fit who he really is and develops a self-concept that is formed in part by what the child genuinely experiences himself and partly of what he feels he must be. The distorted self-concept quickly warps the organismic valuing process, resulting in impaired perceptions of himself and his world and of the choices he can make. Psychopathology results when we become more externally oriented than internally oriented, trying to manufacture feelings or behavior that others demand we exhibit before we can be acceptable. The incongruence between what we really are and what we are trying to be creates psychological pain.

It is ironic, and probably significant, that Rogers grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home and rejected the faith of his parents while he was in college. He opted instead for “liberalistic humanism” and apparently never deviated from that position for the rest of his life [H. Van Belle, Carl Ransom Rogers, in D. Benner (Ed.), Baker encyclopedia of Psychology, (Baker, 1985).