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Eastern Perspective Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

This is only a summary of chapter 16 in the textbook Personology: From individual to ecosystem by C Moore, HG Viljoen and WF Meyer. Thus all credit goes to the publishers of the textbook.

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

Introd­uction and Background

Western Psychology
Eastern Psychology
- Scient­ific, analytical and reduct­ion­istic, with the goal of analysing, predicting and contro­lling human behaviour and is influenced by the Western rational, indivi­dua­listic and more extrov­erted lifestyle.
- Originate from a religious and metaph­ysical tradition with subjective observ­ation and direct subjective experience as its paradigm, and it reflects the more introv­erted, collec­tivist and mystical Eastern lifestyle.
- The focus is on the object of experience
- The focus is on the person having the experi­ence.
- Based on the method of third-­person observ­ation and measur­ement.
- The method is based on first-­person intros­pection
- In modern times, is strongly embedded in a positivist objective view of the person and the empirical paradigm.
- Typified as intuitive and integr­ating, with its major aims to acquire knowledge of the soul and of how to set the soul free through self-r­eal­isa­tion.
- Person believes ‘in doing’
- Person believes ‘in doing’
- Revolves around indivi­dualism focusing on the person­ality of the indivi­dual,
- Centres around collec­tivism and is more interested in the person’s harmonious connec­tedness to fellow humans, society, nature and the cosmos.
- In Western psycho­logy, the ego, ‘I’ or self is central and must be preserved, extended or actualised at all costs.
- In the East, self-a­ctu­ali­sation refers to transc­endence of the self rather than the extension of the self, which is how it is understood in the West.
- Aim is to ‘fortify the indivi­dual’s ego’ in order to become less neurotic and function better in society.
- Aim is to ‘dissolve rather than to strengthen the ego’

Person­ality According to Vedanta