> Could you expand a bit? And also this is the first I've heard of a
> Buddhist psychology -- are there books? or practitioners? or are you
> just speaking metaphorically?
The quickie answer is that Buddhist psychology classifies all states of mind, very broadly speaking, as related positively, negatively, or neutrally to objects -- that is, we either like what we are currently experiencing and want to keep on experiencing it, dislike it and want to get away from it, or neither like it or dislike it -- are just indifferent to it.
Both the desire to keep on experiencing what gives us pleasure as long as possible and the desire to get away from what we don't like as fast as possible are forms of "clinging," and clinging is what creates the illusion of a permanent self. (Oh-oh, we're back at that dreaded subject again! But it keeps coming up when you discuss Buddhist matters.) ("Illusion" because both the objects of experience and the experiences of them are constantly flowing from one to another.) So important is this need to cling to positive experiences that, even in extreme cases such as the Nazi camps, as a number of survivors have pointed out, people were able to find joy in even the slightest alleviations of their misery. And the need to flee from "bad" experiences, or protect the "self" from them, gives rise to a whole host of psychological phenomena, from denial and forgetting of traumatic experiences to superstitions that knocking on wood, etc., can protect one.
Most religions derive from these mechanisms, too: if the universe one lives in is created by and watched over by a "good God," the self can delude itself into thinking that, however bad things may look in this life, it will enjoy a blissful eternal afterlife, provided it is a good little self in this world. (In the traditional Buddhist cosmology, there are also heavens in which the gods live quite pleasantly and hells where the residents are distinctly uncomfortable, but in both cases the beings born in these places eventually are reborn out of them, so there is no refuge from constant change even there.) Then again, of course, there are the Gnostic, Manichaean, and other endless variations on the theme, in which good gods are responsible for the good aspects of the world and bad gods for the bad ones. All of these, from the Buddhist point of view, are projections of the workings of the mind into the world outside, psychologies in cosmological dress, if you will.
As for books -- are there books?!! A lot of the ancient suttas and sutras (probably most of them, in fact) are basically psychological texts. The Abhidhamma, in particular, is an immense catalogue of every conceivable mental state, the elements of them, and the causal relations between them, compiled by monks who had nothing better to do for years and years but sit around and watch their minds working. Fascinating stuff, in small doses, but extremely long and detailed.
Contemporary writers are much easier to get through: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman, and Mark Epstein, to name a few. Then there's the 800-lb. (actually, 800-page) gorilla of the literature: _Zen and the Brain_ by James H. Austin, M.D., a neurologist who also took extensive Zen training.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax