MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Politics and Psychoanalysis
Earlier this century, Thomas Mann observed that politics was modern man's substitute for religion but omitted to add that there is no salvation or enlightenment to be gained from any political ersatz. Nor is there anything new in this, for even during the great ages of faith, men were busy perverting their religion into politics. But the twentieth century is so besotted with that heady noun, Revolution, that it seems to have overlooked its derivation from the verb to revolve, Just as Buddhahood is the hub of pure Conscious Being, so political agitation and strife, whether subversive or retrogressive, represent the most peripheral and polluted mode of Becoming, the most defiled level of consciousness and the farthest that man can fall from Reality. Politics is the mud on the rim of the Wheel of Existence that keeps it perpetually slipping around on the same spot. So the faster the cycle of social change is driven onward, the sooner it returns to its starting-point. But revolutions do not merely restore the status quo: with every revolution comes a progressive loss of liberty and a spiritual decline in the quality of living, as the Samsaric Wheel sinks ever deeper into the mire.
Now the downward path of conversion to radical and authoritarian politics involves a psychological reconditioning and indoctrination by party propaganda that enacts an inverted parody of true initiation. It matters little whether the party is of the ultra Left or the ultra Right, since extremes meet and sign pacts to impose stainless-steel tyrannies of ever-greater efficiency. The totalitarian aim of both is nothing less than the total enslavement of the individual to the absolutist State and his subservient conformity to the social ant-heap. We are all too familiar with such horrific examples as Marxism, Leninism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, and the other political dogmatisms that find so much favour with the bureaucratic planners of other people's lives. The doctrinaire converts to such systems show all the symptoms of political paranoia and rapidly deteriorate into the homicidal mania of militarism.
After politics, the most fashionable form of the downward path among the older generation has been the pseudo-initiation into some school of psychoanalysis. This provides a secular caricature of the Roman Catholic confessional, conducted by an alienist who has himself been alienated by undergoing the obligatory analysis, a psychotherapist who possesses higher medical degrees but is without any spiritual qualifications of sanctity or Traditional commitment. The only prerequisite for acceptance by an analyst is that the applicant be neurotic or psychotic and sufficiently wealthy to pay the fees for a treatment that is as prolonged as its 'cures' are infrequent.