Product Description

How can we connect the spiritual realizations of Buddhism with the psychological insights of the West? In Toward a Psychology of Awakening John Welwood addresses this question with comprehensiveness and depth. Along the way he shows how meditative awareness can help us develop more dynamic and vital relationships and how psychotherapy can help us embody spiritual realization more fully in everyday life. Welwood's psychology of awakening brings together the three major dimensions of human experience: personal, interpersonal, and suprapersonal, in one overall framework of understanding and practice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166532 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-12
• Released on: 2002-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com Review
Have you ever noticed that self-described spiritual people are not necessarily all that easy to be with? John Welwood has a term for what often happens--spiritual bypassing. This is when a person reaches for the stars while forgetting about the goop on his shoes. Welwood, author of the popular Love and Awakening and Journey of the Heart has made a profession out of bringing East and West together, integrating the path to enlightenment with the techniques of psychotherapy. In Toward a Psychology of Awakening, Welwood integrates a series of his articles written over a period of 30 years in an attempt to explain the dynamics of psychologies East and West. The hope is that, combined, they can create a wholeness that encompasses the various levels of human experience. Since many of these articles were written for specialist readers, they won't have the verve and inspiration of Welwood's other books, but Welwood fans and enthusiasts of transpersonal psychology will be delighted to have all these ground-breaking articles together in one place. So go ahead and reach for the stars--just don't forget that you still have to slog through the mire with the rest of us. --Brian Bruya

From Publishers Weekly
Much has been written about the link between Buddhism and psychotherapy in recent years. Yet this thoughtful work by longtime psychotherapist and Buddhist practitioner Welwood (Love and Awakening) shows that an experienced observer can add much to the emerging conversation about a path of development that could embrace both personal psychology and the deeper reaches of our inner nature. In traditional Chinese philosophy, the human condition was seen to touch three dimensions: earth, heaven and man. At its best, Welwood believes, psychotherapy acts as earth, grounding the individual, while Buddhist thought and practice can be heaven, liberating a person from fixed ideas and blind spots by providing a spacious view of the real self. To become fully human--able to embrace our experience with an open heart and an open mind--we must stretch between heaven and earth. Welwood illustrates how this stretching works by showing how various concepts from Buddhism and from psychotherapy play out in practice. "The Mahamudra lineage of Tibetan Buddhism sees the awakened mind and the confused mind as two sides of the same reality," he writes. "An image from this tradition that portrays coemergence is that of the silkworm binding itself in its own silk." Welwood describes how one client built a sense of self in a deprived environment by identifying with deprivation itself; how another nurtured a sense of specialness and aliveness by identifying with sadness to distinguish himself from his uncaring family. The author helped these clients appreciate the brilliant resourcefulness behind the defensive personalities--the better to eventually let them go. Rich, potentially transforming insights abound here. Psychotherapists and spiritual seekers alike will be enriched by this book. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Welwood, a clinical psychologist, associate editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and author (Love and Awakening, LJ 1/96), here offers an anthology of revised and updated versions of articles he has published over the last 25 years plus new material. The result is an original, intellectually rigorous perspective of the convergence of Buddhism and Western psychology. Welwood's brilliant use of metaphor and historical reference and his emphasis on the heart set him apart from other East/West writers like Ken Wilber (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Shambhala, 1995) and Alan Watts (Psychotherapy, East and West, Pantheon, 1961), who are more intellectual. Readers who enjoy Thomas Moore and can accept a more Eastern flavor will want to read this book. Highly recommended for large public libraries and academic libraries with broad psychology collections.
-Madeleine Nash, York Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Half a book
This is an excellent book on the theory of enlightenment. I have asked numerous Buddhists of differing denominations, what is enlightenment, and few have been able to give me a straight answer. Some acted like it was a supernatural state of being that was impossible to achieve unless you were destined to achieve it in this lifetime. Others claimed that enlightenment was undefinable and only the one enlightened would know if they were (of course, if the only person who could tell they were enlightened was themselves, enlightenment was no more than a self-delusion). Without understanding what enlightenment is, there is no reason for anyone to wish to be enlightened.

John Welwood does an excellent job at explaining the state of enlightenment. John clarifies the distinction between being non-existent and the non-existence of the self, since they are not the same thing. John shows how the source of suffering can be caused by the split between our perceptions of reality and reality itself. We think we know reality when all we really know is our are mis-perceptions of reality created by the constant filtering of reality by the ego. We live in a dream world of our own re-making and whenever our dream world clashes with actual reality, reality always wins, and we suffer as a result. We need to awaken and start trying to see reality as it is instead of what we wish it were like. This is what enlightenment is -- awakening from suffering and the games people play and the misperception of reality -- but although many try, few succeed in ever attaining it. There are many things to distract a person from ever reaching that goal so it takes belief, desire, and a little guidance, from time-to-time, from someone 'higher up' than ourselves. John believes the next step in conscious or psychological evolution is going to be in the realm of passionate relationships and devotes a third of the book to this topic. He gives a good case for this belief, one that shoe horns nicely into the theories of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. In other words, by concentrating on fully conscious, passionate relationships, we have the greatest chance of reaching enlightenment today.

This is all excellent material except for one thing: theory is nice but theory is all talk and no action. Passionate relationships is only half of the equation and John is a heavy promoter of meditation -- the other half of the equation -- yet he offers no guidance whatsoever on how to meditate. His excuse? Psychological therapy and meditation do not mix -- to which I say, what a stupid excuse! I've tried John's method of meditation, which he describes as focusing on the silence between thoughts, and all that happens to me is I fall asleep. So why did I give this book five stars, despite this glaring omission and blunder? Because the theory is well thought out, easy to understand, and confirmed by demonstrable facts -- much more so than many other books I've read on the topic. This book is a great compliment to HOW TO SEE YOURSELF AS YOU REALLY ARE by the Dalai Lama, a book which goes into exquisite detail on how to meditate.

Good intro on the subject
Good book, just a bit all over the place because it is a collection of articles that the author altered to fit into book form. I wish the author would come out with a more comprehensive book on the subject. He seems to focus on healing relationships much.
I also disagree somewhat with meditative psychologists, saying that meditation is about transcending the self completely. I would argue that a component of meditation is better/nonverbal understanding of one's psycholoy as a whole. Also with my Zen experience, we try not to focus on talking about in great lenghts, what exactly we are doing when sitting, because it isn't about expecting something.
But I'll say kudos to this author. It was from reading him and Charlotte Beck that got me to search out a psychotherapist that understands the meditative disciplines. Meditation may be the grounds toward psychological wholeness, but the complicated western mind needs psychological.
I've always wondered why some so called masters are still neurotic.

Not everything is solved on the meditation cushion
Most folks who join a Buddhist center in the West likely have a combination of psychological pain and spiritual angst, and it is often difficult to sort out which is which. There are many Western Buddhists with years of meditation practice under their belts, but who nevertheless feel anxious about their so-called negative emotions and who, in some part of their minds, hold doubts about their worthiness as human beings. Unfortunately, these folks are wary of psychotherapy and labor under the delusion that more meditation, more community service, and a stricter adherence to the Buddhist precepts will "cure" this state of affairs. It won't. As John Welwood points out in *Toward a Psychology of Awakening*, most Westerners have grown up in modern societies in which obtaining stable, meaningful work, engaging in significant long-term relationships and belonging to supportive communities are tasks that were much easier achieved by their grandparents than by themselves. Thus, meditation practice in and of itself is never sufficient to attain wholeness. Welwood shows us that it is only by acknowledging our wounds and fully opening to being present with ourselves will we begin the slow task of integrating ourselves with our experience--a task which in many cases will necessitate psychotherapy. This book complements Rob Preece's *The Wisdom of Imperfection* and Harvey B. Aronson's *Buddhist Practice on Western Ground* very nicely.