09/06/97 1:40 AM In his famous formulation, William James, one of the first psychologists to explore religious experience with

the goal of salvaging its values, concluded that if there be higher powers able to impress us, they may only get access to us only through the subliminal door. Drawing upon the most recent findings of science, we might now say that Gaia,-however we might want to envisage the life-creating and enhancing potentiality of our planet-- gains access to us though the door of the id. The voice of the Earth is that close by. If we are, as the Romantic poets believed, born with the gift of hearing that voice, then turning a deaf ear to her must be a wrenching effort, and a painful one to maintain, just as all efforts to hide from the truth of our identity must be painful. Pepression hurts. We call that pain neurosis. passage quoted from Teddy Roszaks The Voice of the Earth Whats most intriguing about this passage is the parallel with the Enlightenment of the Buddha Dharma. The realization of the Buddha-nature. Liberation. Yet the Buddhists complicate this view with ther insistance on there being no ego, no personality, no self and that any notion of a self is maya - illusion. A construct we are apparently taught by conditioning to view our identity as a mindless body with instinctive appetites for food water sex and control. If we put the two together here, perhaps we can come to a better understanding of the Buddhist view that may be lost in translation from the original Pali/Sanskrit into English. Perhaps the Buddhists, as D.T. Suzuki says almost overtly in the book he co-wrote with Erich Fromme (Zen and Psychoanalysis) have always been involved in the same project as psychiatry. The relief of the suffering that comes from the concealment of and repression of the truth about psyche although the Buddhist prefer to replace the psyche with sunyata -

Emptiness then they go on to explain that its not the type of emptiness we might imagine and on they go into another set of dead ends with words. In Buddhism and especially in its Zen sect, the therapist firmly resists all types of intellectualization; discouraging the reading of even the holy books of their tradition and also discouraging the asking of questions perhaps the method in this apparent irrationality is exactly that to identify language as the medium via which the repression of the truth is accomplished. Seen in this way, the Zen therapist is not really discouraging reading of sutras or asking of questions the therapists needs both in order to demomnstrate in action that it is language that is the enemy that is causing the pain of bifurcation or as I prefer to call it Confinement or even better still as well as also: Miniaturization or compression densification and so this is the message I get from Teddy here. Does Teddy wake up every morning there in the Oakland hills and remain continuosuly conscious of the truth that his real self nature is older than the sixteen billion years old physical Universe and is neither born nor subject to death