Author: Vladimir Miletić
Kelly’s theory is nothing short of a magnificent intellectual achievement. At least for me. Ever since I began reading Kelly over a decade ago, I find myself more and more enchanted by his thinking. And while personal construct psychology (PCP) is the main tool I use in my psychotherapy practice, it is also the way I see the world when I am done being a therapist for the day. Being a constructivist is, in other words, superordinate to being a therapist.
While I find constructivist living to be deeply fulfilling, it can also be lonely, so I look for similar theories and like-minded people. Ever since high school (let’s not count the years here), I’ve had daily my meditation practice and sometimes I wonder if my meditation practice is what made Kelly’s PCP such a natural fit. In my opinion, the connection between what goes on in meditation through a Buddhist lens and how PCP sees people and the world are practically everywhere. In fact, when I teach meditation, I teach it through constructivist psychology!
In this blog, I would like to explore one connection that deserves far more serious consideration than a blog post permits – some parallels between Kelly’s conception of the world and the Buddhist notion of non-duality. Other than some writings of professor Spencer McWilliams, I haven’t encountered many other attempts to bring these two geographically distant yet similar ways of thinking.
I promise, I will do my very best to make this painless. No need to run away.
The Heart Sutra, also known as Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra is short and concise. If you’ve ever attended a Buddhist meditation retreat, it’s likely that you’ve recited it too. It is considered to be one of the most important and profound texts of Mahayana Buddhism. The Heart Sutra contains the essence of the Perfection of Wisdom teachings.
The sutra takes the form of a dialogue between the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara, and the monk Śariputra through which Avalokiteśvara explores the nature of reality and the transcendent wisdom that leads to the final liberation from suffering. All that in about 260 characters, about the size of your average scientific article abstract! You can read Thich Nhat Hanh’s 2014 translation here.
The sutra packs a mean punch, so let’s here focus on where I see the punch:
…all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.
Recite it out loud. See how you respond to it emotionally. There’s something grand and radical about it, no? But… what do these verses mean?
Emptiness is also known as „shunyata“ in Sanskrit. Contrary to what you may think, emptiness is not a nihilistic concept but an important and liberating insight into the nature of reality. According to the Heart Sutra, all phenomena, including objects, people, thoughts, feelings, are all devoid of an inherent, fixed, or independent self-existence. From the perspective of the Heart Sutra, things do not possess an unchanging essence or an independent existence but arise as a result of interactions between various causes and conditions. In other words, truly nothing has a permanent self-existing nature. Everything that exists is impermanent, interdependent, and interconnected.
Because the self only exists in relation to the other, this only exists because that exists too, separation between people (for example) as we experience it in everyday life merely reflects our ignorance, or so the Buddhists would have us believe! The understanding that there is no inherent separation is what is called non-duality. The ultimate realization of non-duality involves transcending the conventional dualistic perception and seeing through the illusion of separate entities or independent existence. This is by no means an intellectual matter. At least to a constructivist, non-duality isn’t particularly difficult to grasp – but how easy is it to realize?
At this point, you may be wondering: OK, Vladimir, but what does this have to do with personal construct psychology?
Personal construct psychology isn’t explicitly nondualist. For one, it is not a philosophical system, although this is perhaps because we didn’t try hard enough to make it one!
George Kelly, its inventor, focused his efforts on outlining a theory that helps people suffer less through psychological means. That’s exactly what Buddhism does too. As the Buddha succinctly pointed out, he taught one thing (and one thing only!): “I teach suffering, its origin, cessation and path.” The huge difference being that Kelly wasn’t interested in offering a philosophy for living, but psychological tools so that we as therapists can help every person find their own philosophy of living. Personal construct theory does not directly address metaphysical or ontological questions about the nature of reality or the self. It is primarily concerned with understanding how individuals develop and use their own unique systems of personal constructs to make sense of the world. There are, however, little hints here and there. Take a look at this quote, from Volume I of Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology:
The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked.
If the universe functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other, it necessarily implies the interconnectedness and interdependence of all phenomena that the Heart Sutra speaks of so profoundly. Kelly typed those words on his typewriter and that initiated a whole chain of events that interlocked with other chains of events that yielded a change in yak milk quality or prices in Tibet in the early 1950s (I’m not sure which one, go look for yourself).
Then, Kelly follows this up with another quote:
In fact, that is the way the universe exists; it exists by happening. Actually, we tried to convey the same notion when we said in an earlier paragraph that the universe is really existing. Indeed, every day and all day it goes about its business of existing.
Elsewhere, Kelly calls humans themselves forms of motion, a definition I’ve always loved. In other words, not only is everything interdependent, but this process is also a dynamic one. Using a progressive tense here is very telling: “the universe is existing”. It’s an ever-unfolding process. The Buddhists may, therefore, say: impermanence is the quality of all things. Kelly can only nod in agreement. Lastly, you can verify it for yourself.
Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and observe phenomena arising and passing away, catching yourself clinging to them in the process. If you’re astute enough, you may even notice that it’s the clinging or the pushing away that makes you suffer. This is, indeed, something that personal construct psychology teaches too. It’s painful and difficult to live a life while stubbornly treating constructions of the world as if they were the world itself. It’s painful and difficult to fight Kelly’s dramatic and profound insight that nothing stays forever, because the universe doesn’t merely exist – it is, instead, existing. What is the case today, may not be the case tomorrow. This very Buddhist practice of sitting and tending to one’s own unfolding experience, reveals to us a world that aligns with PCP.
Let’s circle back to the beginning, so that we can bring this to an end. I lamented the fact it can be lonely to be a constructivist, but here we see that even that loneliness is a non-constructivist illusion. Teachings from the Heart Sutra as well as from The Psychology of Personal Constructs urge us to think of the very notion of the self as merely a construct, an artificial delineation of an overall universe with many working parts. I can’t be lonely when my very existence depends on the existence of other people, places and things. Lonely can mean forgetting that we’re intrinsically all deeply connected.
Living as a constructivist means that we continuously put this insight into practice and, of course, fail at it time and time again, as we do find plenty of use for our illusion of separateness and the fiction that is our self. To live as a constructivist is to live knowing that you are a walking, evolving hypothesis. Once we develop that awareness, life becomes easier, more agreeable. A hypothesis that is useful today, won’t be useful tomorrow because the universe will have evolved and restructured itself to be something else. In response, we’ll reshape our hypotheses, and they will reshape the world.
The heart of Kelly’s theory is empty, and that is, perhaps, its most liberating side. It leaves all the room you need to play around with different fictions, try them on for a size, use them and then discard them without fear. Let’s end with Kelly’s own quote:
What I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders who he really is – whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be. Adam must have experienced such a moment.