MANILA, Philippines – Ateneo School of Government dean Antonio La Viña never attended the classes of Fr Jaime Bulatao, the Jesuit psychologist who founded Ateneo’s Psychology Department and was known for his writings on Filipino psychology and hypnosis.

He had interacted with Bulatao “many times,” however, before he died at 8:25 pm on Tuesday, February 10.

La Viña, for one, drove him to wakes and parties – times when they “always talked about ghosts and other spirits.” He also used the work of Bulatao, known in Ateneo as Father Bu, “to explain our experience of faith and religion.”

“But the experience I will never forget with Father Bu is when he enabled us to fly – yes, fly, through astral travel – to places we could only imagine,” La Viña wrote.

Astral travel is “a phenomenon in which an individual’s body leaves the physical body and hovers or travels to other terrestrial places or points otherwise unknown to man,” according to Leila Dane in her article “Astral Travel: A Psychological Overview” in the Journal of Altered States of Consciousness.

La Viña recalled: “Following that hypnotic voice, I once traveled to a friend’s balcony and asked for forgiveness from that friend for having hurt her. And sure enough, a week or two later, a letter from that friend came, telling me I was forgiven.

“Father Bu enabled those unique experiences and many things. There will never be a person like him again,” he said.

Bulatao, 92, died in Ateneo’s Jesuit Residence on Tuesday after he was confined for days in a hospital. Ateneo did not detail the cause of death.

Former students of Bulatao, a co-founder of the Psychological Association of the Philippines, attended his wake that began on Wednesday, February 11, in Ateneo’s college chapel. The Society of Jesus, to which he belonged since 1939, was set to lead his burial at the Sacred Heart Novitiate Cemetery in Quezon City on Saturday, February 14.

‘Seer of one’s mission,’ too 

In his homily for the first evening Mass during Bulatao’s wake, Ateneo president Fr Jose Ramon Villarin, 55, said he remembers the Jesuit psychologist as “a seer – a seer of minds and hearts.”

“Actually sometimes I was afraid to see him, because sometimes he would see things in me that sometimes I refuse to see,” Villarin said on Wednesday. “Self-seeing, self-awareness, self-consciousness – a very important attribute for leaders, for servants….Father Bu had it.”

He added: “It’s very hard to see oneself, right, because we wear so many lenses, so many masks, and sometimes it takes someone like Father Bu to unmask the pretensions, to take out the hypocrisy sometimes that we wear. He was someone who saw things beyond boundaries, and encouraged us and dared us to see beyond the barriers.”

The Ateneo president also called Bulatao “a seer of one’s mission.”

Villarin – a multi-awarded scientist who belonged to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 along with Al Gore – said it was Bulatao who encouraged him to enter the field of science.

He noticed Bulatao’s “single-mindedness” in urging him to be a scientist, as the psychologist would often greet him, “O, how’s the science?”

“And I’m grateful to him because he valued the service of the intellectual apostolate. He was an intellectual. But very practical and very close to people. Not divorced from others, in an ivory tower,” Villarin said.

Dr Patricia Licuanan, chair of the Philippines’ Commission on Higher Education and former chair of Ateneo’s Psychology Department, described Bulatao as a “highly effective and much sought after clinical psychologist.”

In her eulogy on Wednesday, she recalled “countless clients from all walks of life” who came to the Psychology Department to meet with Bulatao. In therapy sessions with the Jesuit, “they could talk with duwendes (dwarves), gaze into crystal balls, experience astral travel, or simply go through the conventional therapist-patient stuff.”

‘Unique combination’

Licuanan said in her eulogy: “Psychology at the Ateneo has traditionally combined the best of the discipline: science and art, scholarship and practice, basic and applied, training rigorous scientists and competent professionals who were also passionate and compassionate. The Psychology Department at the Ateneo represented this unusual combination because Father Bu, its founder, was a unique combination of these important aspects of psychology.”

Dr Boboy Alianan, an Ateneo teacher who was Bulatao’s former student, said he remembers Bulatao for “life-long learning.” Alianan said Bulatao taught in Ateneo until around 5 or 6 years ago.

“A lot of the lessons I learned from him, I just learned from him modeling it rather than reading about it,” he said.

He added that Bulatao’s work on Filipino psychology is helping make their field relevant in the Philippine context. “Psychology is a very culture-based field,” he explained.

Ateneo’s Pscyhology Department said in a statement, “As a clinical psychologist, Father Bu aimed to find the kind of therapy best suited for Filipinos, experimenting with different alternatives that combined both his knowledge of Western methods and his understanding of the local culture.”

He is known for his study on split-level Christianity in the Philippines, which is seen when Christians fail to walk their talk.

In 1966, Bulatao defined it as “the coexistence within the same person of two or more thought-and-behavior systems which are inconsistent with each other.” (READ: Philippines: Land of split-level Christianity)

In his homily on Wednesday, Villarin asked Bulatao to “pray for us, please, to see what you saw, to be fascinated by the unknown, to be unafraid, to be driven to explore the unexplored frontier, to have the courage to risk our lives in commitment even if we do not see everything appearing.

“Pray for us to be crazy, to be crazy enough to stand on our heads, to be able to imagine what life can be, who God is, who we can we become, who God dreams us to be.” – Rappler.com