Presented at the International Conference on Identity Studies in Vienna, Austria. http://socialsciencesandhumanities.com/upcoming-conferences-call-for-papers/international-conference-on-identity-studies/index.html

1. International Conference on
Identity Studies
Vienna, Austria, Hotel Le Meridien
07/26/14 – 07/27/14

2. The Psychological Construction of Reality:
An Essay in the Buddhist Psychology of Knowledge
Robert Beshara, M.F.A.
The University of West Georgia

3. Sources of inspiration

4. Identity

5. Technologies of self-knowledge
Who
am
I?

6. “I’m the f***ing Mona Lisa, bitches!”
In the West,
we fetishize
the Self via
new
technologies
(e.g.,
smartphones
and social
networks)
But is this
really a
practice of
self-
knowledge?

7. Changing the question
Who am I? How am “I” (this body-
mind complex in
spacetime called
Robert)—how am I
interbeing with the
world?
Or more importantly,
who do I want to
become?

8. Deconstructive questions
• What are self and identity, and what is the
relationship between them?
• What is the relationship between
consciousness and the unconscious?
• What is the relationship between knowledge
and wisdom?
• What is the relationship between the body,
the mind, and the world?

9. Self and Identities

10. Self and Identities:
Same idea, different words
• Self and skandhas or aggregates (Buddhist
Psychology)
• Self and id, ego, and super-ego (Freudian
Psychoanalysis)
• Self and Parts (Internal Family Systems Model
or IFS)
• Self and complexes & archetypes (Analytical
Psychology)
• Self and subpersonalities (Psychosynthesis)

11. The Five Skandhas
(or aggregates)
1. Form
2. Feelings
3. Perceptions
4. Mental formations
5. Consciousness

12. The decentered subject of
Freudian Psychoanalysis
Who we are
(consciously and
unconsciously) vs.
who we think we
are (e.g., delusions
of grandeur).

13. Richard Schwartz’s
IFS Model
According to the IFS model,
the Self is a leader like the
conductor of an orchestra.
There three main parts
identified by Richard
Schwartz are:
Managers, firefighters, and
exiles.

14. Carl G. Jung’s
Analytical Psychology
The goal of therapy:
deconstructing identities to
reconstruct the Self
(aka individuation). In other
words, who’s in charge here?

15. Roberto Assagioli’s
Psychosynthesis

16. Understanding Our Mind:
Key Buddhist concepts
• The Four Noble Truths: suffering, creating
suffering, cessation of creating suffering, and the
path.
• The Noble Eightfold Path: Right View, Right
Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right
Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness,
and Right Concentration.
• The Three Marks of Existence: impermanence,
suffering, and non-self.
• The Two Truths Doctrine: Relative Truth and
Absolute Truth

17. Three Kinds of Suffering
1. The suffering of suffering (e.g., the pain of a
toothache).
2. The suffering of composite things (i.e.,
everything decays).
3. The suffering associated with change (aka
impermanence): we all grow old, get sick,
and die.

18. Anattā, or non-self
• Non-self means we are empty of a separate
self. We do not exist in a vacuum.
• In other words, everything is interconnected
—we inter-are.
• A positive restatement of non-self is to call it
relational, social, or dialogical Self.
• The Self is empty because it is made up of
non-Self elements as I illustrated earlier with
the bit on Self and identities.

19. Right View: Interbeing
“As a practitioner of mindfulness, you look deeply into
this flower and you see that it is made only of non-
flower elements. There’s a cloud inside also, because if
there’s no cloud, there’s no rain and no flower can
grow. So you don’t see the form of a cloud, but the
cloud is there. And that is the practice of what we call
signlessness. You don’t need a sign, a certain form of
appearance in order to see it. There’s the sunshine
inside. We know that if there is no sunshine, no flower
can grow. There is the topsoil inside. Many things are
inside: light, minerals, the gardener. It seems that
everything in the cosmos has come together to help
produce this flower” (Hanh, 2013).

20. Knowledge vs. wisdom
Oedipus
(Aristotle/empiricism/science)
Tiresias
(Plato/rationalism/philosophy)

21. Wisdom and the eye of the mind

22. Transpersonal Knowing (Hart, Nelson,
& Puhakka, 2000) vs. Knowledge
Wisdom Ignorance
Knowing
Past
Present
Non-self
(Interbeing)
Separate
self
Who you think
you are
(consciousness)
Who you are
(consciousness + the unconscious)

23. Ways of Transpersonal Knowing
• Examples include: empathic encounters between
persons, sexual experiences, and service.
• Mindfulness, as a practice, is one way of transpersonal
knowing, where affect, cognition, and volition can be in
harmony. Body and mind are one in the here and the
now.

24. Seeds of mindfulness
(Hanh, 1998, p. 208)
I think therefore I am not.
To be or not to be, that is not the question.

25. Theses
• The Self is a paradox. It is an illusion; nevertheless, a
useful one (e.g, self-leadership).
• We have multiple identities not just one; they
shouldn’t be in charge.
• A transdisciplinary psychology ought to look at the
interactions between the body, the mind, and the
world.
• We need not only knowledge (science) but also
wisdom (philosophy) if we are to survive as a
species, which is a call for secular ethics--a new
mythos perhaps?

26. The Self Illusion:
The Self as an organizing principle

27. The mind-body problem & the
hard problem of consciousness
The 3rd
substance as Ultimate Reality

28. Electromagnetism as a metaphor
for bodymind

29. Why do we need a Self?
The Mirror Stage
Healthy narcissism of the modern neurotic

30. Auto-eroticism vs. self-reflection
Self-reflection as vanity (think selfies) vs. the mirror
as “a symbol of the power of reflection to modify
desire (Booth, 2008, p.95), which perhaps
distinguishes us from other animals?

31. Self-leadership:
The Self as a conductor

32. Towards a transdisciplinary psychology:
Body, mind, and world
Mind ≠ Brain
Body ≠ perfect European man
(e.g., the Vitruvian Man)
World ≠ the Americas

33. What is mind?
• “Mind is defined in Buddhism as a non-physical
phenomenon which perceives, thinks, recognizes,
experiences and reacts to the environment.”
• “The two main types of mind are explained as the
conceptual and the non-conceptual. The conceptual
is the "normal" mind aspect we use to survive in
daily life, but is ultimately mistaken about the way
in which reality exists. The non-conceptual type of
mind is also called the Buddha nature […]
fundamental pure nature of mind which realizes
emptiness.”
Source: http://viewonbuddhism.org/mind.html

34. The dualistic nature of language:
Or how we reify our Selves
• “Lightning strikes”
• A similar principle is at work when it comes to
selfhood, or psychological reality in general.
When we say “I,” we reify ourselves, and we
separate ourselves from the Other, which is
the subject-object problem in Western
philosophy.
• Can consciousness exist without an observer?

35. The myth of individualism
Governments,
corporations, and the
mass media will have
us believe that we are
incredibly unique so
that we do not stop
consuming, be that in
the form of purchasing
a product or casting a
vote.
(individualism vs.
individuation, which is a
transpersonal concept that
has to do with integration)

36. Context is everything:
Self vis-à-vis society
In the West, the
Copernican revolution
was a paradigm shift
that resulted in the
decentering of the Self
among other things

37. Our relationship with the world:
Cosmology as a metaphor for the Self

38. The geocentric model

39. The heliocentric model
The cult of celebrity: In contemporary mythology, we
worship celebrities, whom we view as demigods. No
wonder why we call them ‘stars.’ Perhaps, we ought
to come up with an alternative system of secular
ethics in place of the god of capitalism?

40. ECOCENTRISM
The next developmental stage in our evolution?
Premodernity => modernity => postmodernity =>
transmodernity
Egocentrism => Ethnocentrism =>
Worldcentrism/Ecocentrism/Biocentrism

41. Essentialism and performativity
• “All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women
merely players.
They have their exits and
their entrances,
And one man in his time plays
many parts,
His acts being seven ages” –
from William Shakespeare’s
As You Like It.

42. Free will vs. determinism
• How can we reconcile biological determinism
with freedom of choice?
• The Buddhist answer is pragmatic: we work
with the givens, and so beyond free will and
determinism, we try to liberate ourselves
from suffering through understanding
(transpersonal knowing) to achieve greater
freedom; after all, creativity is about working
within limitations.

43. Conclusion
• Our Self and identities are not only socially
constructed, they are also psychologically constructed.
• SC can help us understand how our Self and identities
are socially constructed, while Buddhist Psychology can
help us understand how they are psychologically
constructed.
• Said psychosocial understanding can only be the result
of a marriage between knowledge and
wisdom/knowing (e.g., mindfulness), especially if we
want to become empowered as individuals in society,
that is, if we want to practice our freedom of choice in
performing any act we desire without being delusional
about who we are.

44. Conclusion (CONT’D)
• In other words, we are not who we think we
are: we are not our bodies and we are not our
minds, souls, or spirits. Rather, we are
bodyminds interbeing with the world in the
here and the now.
• Think of the liberating potential of the current
framework in terms of individual
transformation and social change.

45. The other side:
Mirrors and reflections in contemporary art
At Belvedere till October 12th
, 2014

46. From the exhibition