Psychotherapy has been around for thousands of years. It is not a recent development of modern culture if we define psychotherapy as the treatment of mental distress. Shamans, medicine men and women, and sorcerers were psychotherapists. Aśvaghoṣa refers to a Buddhist monk as "manaso bhiṣak,” that is, a physician of the mind, or if you prefer a psychotherapist. These psychotherapists used herbs, mantras, and most of all, used the placebo effect to effect healing. Unlike Western psychotherapy, traditional psychotherapists didn’t divide the spiritual from the rational or mind from body. The traditional psychotherapist we could even say, understood that the health of our cells largely depends upon epigenetic factors. For example, bad water and stress are not good for cells.
Western psychotherapy is mainly stuck in 19th century physical and biological models which it refuses to leave. It totally ignores the spiritual side of traditional psychotherapy in the treatment of mental distress, one obvious example being the placebo effect and meditation. To this day, Western psychotherapy still employs ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) which is done under general anesthesia for people severely depressed or suicidal. Some people will undergo several hundred treatments which attests to ECT’s inability to cure the problem, adequately!
Besides traditional psychotherapy as a means to heal common mental distress, there were the ancient mystical traditions found in the Vedas, the Upanishads, Buddhist and Yoga sutras, that go back thousands of years. They were deeply concerned with longterm human suffering, that is, human suffering as being entrapped in the cycles of birth and death. They proposed that such suffering can be reduced and even alleviated by understanding karma and by overcoming ignorance of one’s true nature.
One serious error the West makes when judging ancient mystical traditions is to confuse them with the Western notion of religion which is centered on an all powerful creator god. In fact, they are worlds apart. The ancient mystical traditions seek to awaken to the hidden true nature that is fundamental in each living being whereas religion is concerned, chiefly, with obedience to a deity, winning its favor, and seeking its aid. The ancient mystics divided human beings into two distinct groups, those capable of understanding the essence of mysticism and those who couldn’t. Presently, the West appears to be gradually succumbing to a demonic (S., asura) religion which is Islam in which rebirth is forever, unhappy. (The Buddha only taught gods and humans—not asura possessed beings.)
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