..續本文上一頁nternal and external, throughout life.

　　Unlike James, Jung saw the integrated personality as lying above the rigid confines of morality. And, although he didn”t use the term, he extolled what Keats called “negative capability”: the ability to deal comfortably with uncertainties and mysteries without trying to impose confining certainties on them. Thus Jung recommended borrowing from religions any teachings that assist the process of integration, while rejecting any teachings that would inhibit the spontaneity of the integrated self.

　　In Religions, Values, and Peak‐Experiences (1970), Abraham Maslow, the American “father of transpersonal psychology,” pided religious experiences into the same two categories used by James. But in an attempt to porce these categories from any particular tradition, he named them after the shape they would assume if graphed over time: peak‐experiences and plateau‐experiences. These terms have now entered the common vernacular. Peak‐experiences are short‐lived feelings of oneness and integration that can come, not only in the area of religion, but also in sport, sex, and art. Plateau‐experiences exhibit a more stable sense of integration and last much longer.

　　Maslow had little use for traditional interpretations of peak experiences, regarding them as cultural overlays that obscured the true nature of the experience. Assuming all peak experiences, regardless of cause or context, to be basically the same, he reduced them to their common psychological features, such as feelings of wholeness, dichotomy‐transcendence, playfulness, and effortlessness. Thus reduced, he found, they weren”t of lasting value unless they could be transformed into plateau experiences. To this end he saw psychotherapy as necessary for their perfection: integrating them into a regime of counseling and education that would actualize the full potential of the human being—intellectual, physical, social, sexual—in a society where all areas of life are sacred, and plateau‐experiences commonplace for all.

　　These three writers on the psychology of religion, despite their differences, kept Romantic ideas about religion alive in the West by giving them the scientific stamp of approval. Through their influence, these ideas have shaped humanistic psychology and—through humanistic psychology—the expectations many Americans bring to the Dharma. However, when we compare these expectations with the original principles of the Dharma, we find radical differences. The contrast between them is especially strong around the three most central issues of spiritual life: What is the essence of religious experience

　　 What is the basic illness that religious experience can cure

　　 And what does it mean to be cured

　　The nature of religious experience. For humanistic psychology, as for the Romantics, religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer pisions. These experiences come in two sorts: peak experiences, in which the sense of oneness breaks through pisions and dualities; and plateau experiences, where—through training—the sense of oneness creates as healthy sense of self, informing all of one”s activities in everyday life.

　　However, the Dharma as expounded in its earliest records places training in oneness and a healthy sense of self prior to the most dramatic religious experiences. A healthy sense of self is fostered through training in generosity and virtue. A sense of oneness—peak or plateau—is attained in mundane levels of concentration (jhana) that constitute the path, rather than the goal of practice. The ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling, but of knowledge: skillful mast…

《The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…