About Morita Therapy
The desire to live fully
- The bigger the desire to live, the bigger the fear of death, and the smaller the desire to live, the smaller the fear of death. An extremely strong desire to live represents a flourishing desire to live, while the absence of a fear of death establishes that the desire to live has been lost.
Different kinds of problems of life and death are dependent upon different degrees of the desire to live fully. When one plunges completely into the limitless realm of life and death it is as though one were in the field of mathematical concepts of plus, minus, and infinity in which there is no longer the problem of life and death.
For example, when anger or love is at its peak, one totally forgets about death, and when the extreme of astonishment or dread is reached, one cannot stand or move and loses completely the desire to live. This occurs because the anger and love explode one's life , and the astonishment and dread are the dead-end destruction of life. - At that time, what must always be kept in mind is that subjective and objective observation are different. In this case, the degree of one's own desire or self-awareness is measured subjectively, but when one becomes one with anger or astonishment one has no consciousness of life and death any more. Put another way, when you travel at the speed of light the magnitude of objects disappears, and when you are on a train you cannot judge how fast the train is going.
- In daily life, people want to eat tasty food or have money or obtain power. Fulfillment of such desires may involve substantial simultaneous effort and distress. Reflecting on our past experiences, we presume how things will develop in the future in human society so as to take desire and distress into account. Then we apply this thinking to our notions of life and death, and we construct a view of life and a life philosophy.
- Then, when the desires are our focus we become optimistic, and when the distress is our focus we become pessimistic. Giving thought to this matter, it may appear to be an objective observation of human life, but it might be merely subjective, or a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity, or an error in calculation of the relation between desire and distress. Both the optimism and pessimism are words that represent subjective feelings. Mr. James anticipated this by saying that a variety of philosophies such as active and passive philosophies have been created by the temperaments of the originating philosophers. The optimism and pessimism may support the idea that life is desirable but difficult or that success is desirable but requires hard work.
Various views of life are formulated about life and death or desire and distress. Those ideas will be handled on the level of cognition when they are criticized objectively and logically. Alternatively, they will lead to bewilderment when stern life reality confronts mental constructions like fantasies, worldly desires and suffering, as the Buddhists point out.
Subjective and objective observations often result in discrepancy or inconsistency, and so I designated their interaction a contradiction in thinking. It is natural to distinguish between the two.
For one thing, one's own perspective keeps changing. In accordance with the principle of relativity, unless the standpoint of an observer has been fixed, phenomena cannot be observed at all. I often criticize philosophy by saying that many philosophies are only playing with thoughts. An armchair theory consisting of a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity is not at all useful for our daily life. In fact, it is a detriment because it deviates from reality due to the contradiction in thinking.
Shoma Morita.
The essence of nervousness and therapy.
Hakuyosha.