Looking at the West Looking at the East: The Radical Western Search for Self Through the Faith of Imagined Others

This chapter, which complements “At the Sufi Tavern” by the author in this volume, offers two perspectives on Westerners turning to the East for religious and spiritual inspiration and renewal: looking elsewhere for what life means here. The first approach has been described (and criticized) as the search for what is global and universal across cultures. Associated with the “classical school” of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University founded in the 1950s, this approach asks if looking to another faith is like learning a new language, moving to a new country, or adopting a new gender identity? The second perspective, associated with the “New Cross-cultural Psychiatry” of Harvard University in the 1970s, asks what is local and particular about other traditions that make it hard to understand them or import them to our world? Straddling both approaches, what do we know as psychiatrists and mental health specialists about migration and its vicissitudes including trauma that might help us understand the motivation, the process, and the impacts of the religious turn to the East? The author discusses the search for meaning and offers nineteenth century missionary and twentieth century anthropological excursions as parables or cautionary tales about exploitation. Turning the notion of le regard or “the gaze” inwards, the author recounts narratives about encounters with non-Western religions (Candomblé in Brazil), with alienation and madness (Hesse’s Steppenwolf), along with poetic Sufi insights about identity and self-knowledge (Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds”) and Buddhist teachings about reality and representation, closing with the possibility of genuine encounters across culture and faiths. A new theory based on the ontology of the Event is offered to understand such unique, challenging and life-altering possibilities.