Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Psychiatry — An Industry of Death?

Last Sunday I went to the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death Museum in Hollywood. That’s the real name of the place. The museum was opened a couple of years ago by the Scientologists. The objective of the museum is pretty obvious from its name: to demonstrate how psychiatry is to blame for nearly all of the evils of modern society, from racism, to the rise of the Nazis, to the Columbine High School massacre, 9/11 and all points in between. If it was bad, it was because of psychiatry. The deaths of nearly every famous person who ever expired from something other than old age are blamed on psychiatry. The paranoia is nearly palpable as you walk through this truly disturbing exhibition, being treated at every turn to graphic depictions of torture, violence and pain. Although the museum is incredibly well constructed, as you would expect for something put together with the money and talents of Hollywood’s best and brightest, it is an intensely uncomfortable place. Even the sooty grime of Sunset Boulevard looked good upon escaping.

I’m going to resist the urge to make fun of Scientology. That’s just too easy. I’m at a total loss when it comes to understanding how anyone can possibly take it seriously, let alone spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on all of its unbelievably hokey rituals. Beck, I’m sorry, I love some of your records, and I look like you when my hair grows out, but as far as religions go, you’re an idiot. Anyway, I think there may be something deeper and more interesting to look at here.

The key to the whole thing was contained in one of the many high-tech video screen exhibits placed at regular intervals around the museum. It may, in fact, be the reason behind the popularity not only of Scientology, but of every other useless crackpot religion out there these days. In this video the narrator declares in deeply expressive coffee rich tones what the most pernicious underlying philosophical conceit of psychiatry really is. The psychiatrist, he solemnly warns us, believes human beings have no souls.

I suppose this is intended to shock. Yet the shock value is lost on Buddhists because Buddha also rejected the idea that human beings have souls. He thoroughly examined this idea in his study, meditation and life experience and found there was no merit to it. The idea of a soul presumes that the universe is composed of two fundamental properties, mind and matter, and that these two properties are mutually exclusive. The Indians of Buddha’s time believed — as many in the subcontinent still do — that the immaterial soul temporarily inhabited the material body, from which it was released at the time of death to go and inhabit some other body. The idea of the separation of body and mind is, of course, not unique to India. Most Western religions are based upon the same notion. In fact, this idea of body/mind separation is so ingrained in almost all human cultures that we find it hard to even envision what Buddha proposed, that body and mind are one and the same.

Science, at least when it started out, wanted to take a purely materialistic view of the world. Accepting as a given the absolute distinction between body and mind, the forerunners of science figured they couldn’t measure or quantify mind, so they simply ignored it and based their theories only upon matter. By the 19th Century an uneasy truce developed between science and religion. The two could exist side-by-side as long as religion stayed on the mind/spirit side of the fence and science stayed on the matter side. Psychology, though, tries to apply scientific concepts to the realm of the mind. It crosses the boundary. And religion doesn’t like that.

In the 20th and 21st centuries we’re seeing religion fight back. Lots of new religions like to present themselves as a type of science. The Hare Krishnas talk about the science of self-realization. Christian Science and Scientology by their very names deliberately intrude into the territory they feel they have unjustly lost to science. It’s nothing new to note that psychologists, in many ways, fulfill the role once played by priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, and even Buddhist teachers. All kinds of new religious doctrines use the vocabulary of science to sell themselves — although there’s a big difference between science and science fiction, forgive me Xenu. Psychology and psychiatry are by far the worst offenders, invading the very heart of the realm once claimed by religion.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the folks who run the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death museum (wink wink!!), like other religious people, have a very big problem with the idea that human thoughts, feelings and emotions are the result of chemical changes within the brain. To a Buddhist, this idea is not troubling at all. A Buddhist need never believe in anything that contradicts legitimate scientific understanding.

It’s a mistake to think that to encompass what has heretofore been thought of as the human soul into the five words “chemical reactions within the brain” is to have understood it completely. In fact, chemical reactions within the brain are very mysterious, even mystical. Chemical reactions in the human brain caused by your nervous system’s reaction to a series of abstract shapes on a lighted screen are enabling you to read my mind right now, to communicate with me across vast distances. If you happen to be reading this in the (hopefully far off) future, those chemical reactions may even be enabling you to communicate with the dead. It’s nothing to be thought of lightly at all.

To say, as Buddha did, that body and mind are one and the same is not just to say that mind is only a function of the body. It is also to say that body is only a function of the mind. But if you try to choose just one or the other of these seemingly mutually exclusive points of view, you’re missing the point entirely. Still, it is absolutely impossible to think of the universe in both of these ways at once. Our brains just cannot do it. This is why Buddhism denies the primacy of thought and instead relies upon intuition and real experience.

Buddhism accepts science because good science is based upon careful observation of the workings of the laws of cause and effect. The theories that science offers are not based upon abstract fantasies but upon what actually occurs in the real world. Religion, on the other hand, offers only abstract fantasies. The realm of fantasy is perfectly free. You can put absolutely anything in there, from Zeus on Mount Olympus, to Heaven’s Holy Hosts, to Xenu and his volcanoes. You can even put mystical Buddhas that shoot laser beams from between their eyes in there if you want. It’s all exactly the same — fantasy. Unlike fantasy, though, reality is absolutely decisive. It is exactly what it is.

Still, science, at least in its present state, can only account for what goes on in terms of the material side of the universe. Even when it seeks to explain the immaterial side of reality in terms of material systems, it falls short. You see a ten-year old girl crying on the side of the road at midnight. You could explain the scene in terms of chemical reactions taking place within the body of a highly developed biped. But this hardly accounts for everything. How can anyone suppose that the entire universe could be summed up in terms of equations and facts?

The folks who run the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death museum understand only that science will never provide the final answer. But rather than trying to find a truly new and different way of looking at life, they instead fall back into the same pattern humanity has tried over and over and over again without success. If materialism doesn’t work, try idealism, when idealism doesn’t work go back to materialism, lather, rinse, repeat. We do need a new answer — desperately — or we are in real danger of destroying ourselves. This is not it.

Note: Thanks for all of the nice comments on last week's entry. I have a Suicide Girls blog that I'm using sort of like footnotes to these articles if you want to check that out too.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up! He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/culture/19626/Brad-Warners-Hardcore-Zen-Psychiatry--An-Industry-of-Death/