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Psychotherapy works on the "self": your problems, your history. One of the aims of mediation is to gradually understand that this self is really an illusion, hence there are in fact no problems and no history. Past does not really define who you are, and problems are only problems if you think reality should be different that what it currently is the moment you experience it (which is of course totally impossible. What you can do is alter the future though.) Now don't get me wrong this self is in fact a very useful interface for interacting with others, etc.
The problem is believing this interface, or layer we add on top on experiences really is us, while it's really just a useful concept to navigate the world. We are all mostly a bunch of habits: this stimuli gives this response because we trained our mind to function this way, were raised that way, live within country X, etc. It's all just mind formatting.
Meditation aims to discover this for yourself, which should leads you to train in developing new, more wholesome habits, which will make you and others suffer less. Then since you are mostly habits, you gradually change, and become much saner as times goes by. Saner because you're living more in adequation with reality. So in a way, psychotherapy can be seen as a dead end for someone who practices meditation.
Although it certainly has its uses, even for very advanced meditators who can also develop blind spots without seeing them (more work needed, but psychotherapy can be a useful mirror there). |
Yes this is a standard Buddhist (and not even exclusively Buddhist) point, and I'd say it's basically correct, but the problem is that it can, and has been understood in dozens of ways. Some more profound than others, and plenty contradicting one another.
Let me give a fairly psychological interpretation. One of our major cognitive functions is to create and maintain an automatic, pre-verbal map of the world, at the center of which stands a mapped entity labeled "ME". Let's call it the "self-representation". This is in itself fine and dandy, and quite useful; it gives us a sense of being an integrated organism through time, and lets us say things like "yesterday I went swimming". More troublingly, it's also the subject of our self-esteem, and of most of our hopes and worries.
The map, with our self-representation in the center, is not the only thing in our awareness - we're also able to attend to stimula and feel our emotions in the here and now. The problem, and the only problem as far as radical Buddhism is concerned, is that our sense of being is most of the time entirely fused with this self-representation. It becomes the entirely of who I am to myself. (Hence Ramana Maharshi's super direct path: inquire within "who am I").
What meditation does, by slowing down the whole mechanism, is to allow us to feel that there is more to me, here and now, than this running self-representation. By insistently putting our attention away from it, we temporally and partially unfuse from the self-representation. We get little breaks from it, where it either it mostly just stops for a while, or it becomes something I see happening, rather than something I am. And if I can see it happening, I can also train myself to not give it so much importance.
The result is a much vaster inner perspective, and a sense of deeper presence - for a few moments at least. But, usually, the moment the meditator notices these changes happening, the most automatic reaction is for the self-representation to rise back up as the one who wants to own that. HEY, INTERESTING STUFF IS HAPPENING TO ME!!! And there you go go crashing again into stuffy ordinary consciousness.
Hence the usual advice you will hear from good meditation teachers: getting experiences if often easy, but not running after them can take years and years of practice.