Posts Tagged ‘higher integrative functioning’
A Psychiatrist’s Journey: “Nothing can be created or destroyed”
“Nothing can be created or destroyed”
I remember having this thought, with great conviction, at the age of three. I was gazing intently at a large rock covered with green moss.
Not the thought of a three year old ….
Valentinus, a second century Gnostic, wrote:
“What liberates us is the knowledge of who we were, what we became, where we were, whereinto we have been thrown, whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth.”
From the age of five, I have been inexplicably drawn to and mesmerized by Tibetan mandalas.
Throughout my life, I have experienced external reality as a projective field. What we apprehend through our five senses, and our sixth sense, is a highly idiosyncratic construction.
This perspective motivated me to study anthropology and psychology in college. I wanted to learn how culture, language, memory and desire shape perception.
During graduate work in psychology, I investigated the physiology of perception. Concurrently I did research at Rockefeller University, on the localization of opiate receptors in the brain.
My interest in higher integrative functioning remained a passion throughout medical school. Inspired by Wilder Penfield’s “Mystery of The Mind,” I decided to become a neurosurgeon.
Three thousand miles (New York to San Francisco) and two years later, I had an epiphany: I truly wanted to be a psychiatrist. As the British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, wrote:
“Home is where we start from.”
The manifest context for my felt urgent need to choose psychiatry included an impassioned reading of Goethe’s Faust, a spontaneous total immersion in philosophical Taoism and a resurgent compelling interest in the life and work of Carl Jung. Jung’s autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” had made a searing impression on me as a fifteen year old.
The reading of a book, “The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self,” by the Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, crystallized my decision.
Some years later, my connection with Tibetan Buddhism resurfaced. I was drawn to seek out teachings from a few Tibetan lamas, notably the Dalai Lama and Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche.
The twin principles of Tibetan Buddhism are compassion and wisdom, “like the two wings of a bird.” I have come to experience compassion as the life force, Henri Bergson’s “Elan Vital.” This force sustains me. It infuses my work.
As Santideva, an 8th century Buddhist, wrote in “The Way of the Bodhisattva:”
“For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide, to dispel the misery of the world.”
