Going on Being: Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and ... On Being Book... · GOING ON BEING LIFE AT THE CROSSROADS OF BUDDHISM AND PSYCHOTHERAPY ... life at the crossroads of Buddhism

Going onBeing

“Epstein gets better with each book—this is his most brilliant yet.”Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

From the bestselling author ofThoughts without a Thinker and Going to Pieces without Falling Apart.

Before he began training as a psychiatrist, Mark Epstein immersed himself inBuddhism through influential teachers such as Ram Dass, Joseph Goldstein, andJack Kornfield. Buddhism’s positive outlook and the meditative principle of liv-

ing in the moment profoundly influenced his study and practice of psychotherapy. Goingon Being is an intimate chronicle of Epstein’s formative years as well as a practical guideto how a Buddhist understanding of psychological problems can help anyone changefor the better. Epstein gives readers a deeply personal look into his life, thoughts, fears,and hopes, while detailing the influences that have shaped his worldview. Inspiring in itshonesty and humility, Going on Being is a compassionate, brilliant look at how unitingthe worlds of psyche and spirit can lead to a new way of seeing reality.

“Going on Being opens the door on what it meansto understand ourselves, to grow and to change.”—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness

“A calm comes over me when I read Mark Epstein’s work. Going on Being extendsEpstein’s vision and provides a personal memoir of his introduction to Buddhistthought in the context of transformative relationships with some remarkable men.”

—Stephen A. Mitchell, author of Freud and Beyond

“Through a graceful and generous recounting of his own quest for healing, Mark Epsteinbrings together core insights of Buddhism and psychotherapy in a way that is newly illumi-nating. It will go among the handful of books that I keep near me for those times when I

reach for true solace.”—Noelle Oxenhandler, author of The Wishing Year

“Going on Being affirms the goodness of our existence andencourages an openness that keeps us fresh.”—Michael Eigen, Ph.D., author of Rage

“Lucid and thoughtful.”—Elle

Life at the Crossroadsof Buddhism and Psychotherapy

MARK EPSTEIN, M.D.

Buddhism / Psychology

“Like the best Buddhist masters, Epstein tells wonderful stories, full of wisdomand flashes of inspiration. From the stories emerges a way of being and seeing.”

—Booklist

Going

onBeing

Mark

Epstein

ISBN 13 978-0-8617-1569-5ISBN 0-86171-569-1 $16.95Wisdom Publications • Boston

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PRAISE FOR GOING ON BEING

“Mark Epstein gets better and better with each book; Going on Being is hismost brilliant yet. He weaves a mindful cartography of the human heart,tying together insights from Buddhism and psychoanalytic thought intoan elegant, captivating tapestry. Epstein shares the spiritual and emotionalinsights garnered from his own life journey in a fascinating account of whatit can mean to us all to go on being.”—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

“Every element of Mark Epstein’s brilliant and beautiful new book is on thehighest level—the spiritual insights, the psychotherapeutic perspective,and his own very human story of wanting to bring greater awareness andlove into his life. Going on Being opens a door on what it means to understandourselves, to grow and change.”—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and A Heart as Wide as the World

“Mark Epstein’s Going on Being joins the heart of psychotherapy with theheart of Buddhism. It takes us to freeing places, uplifts our lives. Honest,personal, searching—it affirms the goodness of our existence and encour-ages an openness that keeps us fresh.”—Michael Eigen, author of The Psychoanalytic Mystic

“A calm comes over me when I read Mark Epstein’s work. His integrationof Buddhist wisdom and meditative practice with the concerns and strug-gles of contemporary Western life reflects a seemingly impossible combi-nation of rich, intricate texture with simplicity and vividness. Going on Beingextends Epstein’s vision and provides a personal memoir of his introductionto Buddhist thought in the context of transformative relationships withsome remarkable men. There is a freshness and relevance to Epstein’s vision



that makes this book a treasure and an important opportunity for anyonewho takes their existence seriously (but not too seriously).”—Stephen A. Mitchell, founding editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journalof Relational Perspectives

“Through a graceful and generous recounting of his own quest for healing,Mark Epstein brings together certain core insights of Buddhism and psy-chotherapy in a way that is newly illuminating. The result is what Buddhistscall ‘a field of benefaction.’ I felt happy reading this book. It will go—nextto his two previous offerings—among the handful of books that I keep nearme for those times, in the middle of the night, when I reach for true solace.”—Noelle Oxenhandler, author of The Eros of Parenthood



GOING ON BEING





Wisdom Publications • Boston

GO ING ON B E I NG

LIFE AT THE CROSSROADS OF

BUDDHISM AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

MARK EPSTE IN, M.D.



Wisdom Publications199 Elm StreetSomerville MA 02144 USAwww.wisdompubs.org

© 2001, 2008 Mark Epstein, M.D.All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic ormechanical, including photography, recording, or by any information storage andretrieval system or technologies now known or later developed, without permission inwriting from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataEpstein, Mark, 1953–Going on being : life at the crossroads of Buddhism and therapy / Mark Epstein.

p. cm.Previously published: New York : Broadway Books, c2001.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-86171-569-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Buddhism—Psychology. 2. Psychotherapy—Religious aspects—Buddhism. 3. Aware-ness. 4. Spiritual life—Psychology. 5. Epstein, Mark, 1953- I. Title.BQ4570.P76E664 2009294.3’42—dc22

2008041530

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eBook ISBN 978-0-86171-959-4



FOR ARLENE





The alternative to being is reacting,and reacting interrupts being and annihilates.

—D.W. Winnicott





CON T EN T S

Introduction xiii

PART ONE

THE CENTRAL WAY

1. Going on Being 3

PART TWO

THE ILLNESS OF BEING SOMEBODY

2. The Freedom of Restraint 17

3. The Easing of Identity 29

4. Mindfulness of Mind 41

PART THREE

THE ILLNESS OF BEING NOBODY

5. The Platform of Joy 59

6. Psychological Emptiness 73

7. The Klesha of “I Am Not” 81

PART FOUR

RELATIONALITY

8. The Problem of the Emotions 93

9. Balance 105

10. Buddha’s Medicine 119

Conclusion: The Quest for Identity 133



G O I N G O N B E I N G

XII

Acknowledgments 141

Notes 143

Index 147

About the Author 157

About Wisdom Publications 159



I N T RODUC T I ON

There is an obscure story about one of Freud’s personal conversationsthat puts an interesting twist on the state of psychology in the West.The discussion was with Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist and

the founder of the existential movement in psychoanalysis. Binswanger feltthat there was something missing in Freud’s approach to therapy—toomany patients simply did not get better. He raised the problem of the paral-ysis of analysis with Freud.

Might there not be a deficiency of spirit, asked Binswanger delicately,such that certain people were unable to raise themselves to a level of “spir-itual communication” with their analysts? Could this lack of spiritual com-munication be the thing that stopped people from healing? To Binswanger’ssurprise, the old man readily acknowledged his point. “Yes,” he said, “spiritis everything.”

Binswanger thought that Freud must have misunderstood his use of theword spirit, perhaps thinking he meant something on the order of “intelli-gence.” But Freud continued on.

“Mankind has always known that it possesses spirit,” Freud said. “I had toshow that there are also instincts.”

When Freud sought to make room for instincts against the backgroundof spirit, he did not anticipate a time when we would forget about spiritaltogether. He could not foresee an era when instincts would reign supreme.By the time I was growing up in twentieth-century America, however, spiritalready seemed out of reach. Freud’s psychology was the accepted languageof the mind, challenged only by B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism. Those of us




XIV

who sensed a “deficiency of spirit” were aware only of a feeling of absence,a yearning for something intangible, a sense of emptiness that could not beexplained. We did not have words or concepts for what we were missing.Even today, one of the most common questions that I am asked is the mean-ing of the word spiritual. Many people have lost touch with it altogether.

“Anything that takes us beyond the personality,” I usually reply. The mostimportant gift that my encounters with Buddhism have given me is accessto this spirit that Freud seemed to have taken for granted. Its recovery wasof crucial importance to me.

Freud was wrong on one particular point in his conversation with Bin-swanger: Mankind does not always know that it has spirit—sometimeswe forget.

HOW PEOPLE CHANGE

Examples of this forgetting abound, even among those searching for a spir-itual life. The split between instincts and spirit comes up in my practice allof the time. A woman named Sally, for instance, called not so long agoseeking advice from me. I had seen her for a single session in consultationmonths before, and we had talked about a variety of therapeutic and spir-itual issues. She was suspicious of the role of psychiatric medications intoday’s culture. It seemed like some kind of brave new world to have mood-altering drugs so readily available. But Sally wondered if there might not bea medicine that could help her. She had been plagued with chronic feelingsof anxiety and depression for much of her adult life, and despite a healthyinvestment in psychotherapy she still felt that there was something thematter with her.

Sally had been taking a small dose of an antidepressant for severalweeks, ten milligrams of Prozac, and she was finding that she felt calmer,less irritable, and, dare she say, happier. She was planning on going to atwo-week meditation retreat later that month and was wondering whetherto stay on her medicine while she was there. Something about taking itwhile on retreat made her uncomfortable, and that was the reason for hercall. “Perhaps I should go more deeply into my problems while I’m away,”



I N T R O D U C T I O N

XV

Sally questioned. She worried that the antidepressant would impede thatprocess by making her problems less accessible to her. What did I think?

I was relieved to hear that Sally was feeling better. People who respondwell to these antidepressants often have few, if any, side effects. They findinstead that they feel restored, healed of the depressive symptoms that theywere expending so much of their energy trying to fend off. Less preoccu-pied with their internal states, they are freer to participate in their ownlives, yet they often wonder if they are cheating. “This isn’t the real me,”they protest. “I’m the tired, cranky, no-good one you remember from a cou-ple of weeks ago.” As a psychiatrist, I am often in the position to encour-age people to question those identifications with their symptoms.Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only knowdepression.

Sally’s question was interesting not only because of the drug issue butbecause of her assumptions about what would make her feel better. Thenotion that we need to go “more deeply” into our problems in order to behealed is a prevalent one, and one that, as a therapist, I am sympathetictoward. Certainly, ignoring the shadow side of our personalities can onlylead to what Freud once called “the return of the repressed.” Yet it struck methat there was a remnant of American Puritanism implicit in Sally’sapproach, or at least a Judeo-Christian tendency to divide the self intolower and higher, or better and worse. Her belief that she should go moredeeply into her problems reminded me of the Freudian emphasis on theinstincts.

When people believe that they are their problems, there is often a desireto pick away at the self, as if by doing so they could expose how bad theyreally are. People think that if they could just admit, or even believe, theawful truth about themselves, they would start to feel better, but feelingbad about oneself seems, in fact, to be a bottomless pit. One never reachesthe far end of it. While it usually fails as a strategy, “going more deeply” intoour problems can be just another variant on trying to get rid of them alto-gether, back to a state of imagined original purity like the Garden of Eden.While most therapists would probably deny a religious influence on theirthinking, many often collude unconsciously with this mode of thought.




XVI

Going more deeply into one’s problems is the standard approach of mosttherapies—and it can indeed lead, at its best, to a kind of sober honesty andhumility that gives people a quiet strength of character.

But to go more deeply into our problems is sometimes to go only intowhat we already know. This approach can also lead, at its worst, to a kind ofjaded pessimism about the self, a resigned negativity that verges on self-hatred. I was quite sure that Sally did not have to go looking for problems onher retreat. Retreats are difficult enough, even for people who are notdepressed. Her unresolved issues would come rushing in to fill every spacewhether she took her antidepressant or not, but she might have more successin not being sucked in by them with the medicine inside of her. I told her thatat this point I felt she needed to come out of her problems, not go into themmore deeply, and that the antidepressant would not get in her way in thatregard. To be overwhelmed while on retreat would not be useful.

As a therapist influenced by the wisdom of the East, I am confident thatthere is another direction to move in such situations: away from the prob-lems and into the unknown. Sometimes this fills us with fear. But if we staywith our anxiety, we have a special opportunity to know ourselves moreauthentically. Buddhism is very clear about how important it is to move insuch a direction, and, as such, it is relentlessly optimistic. Rather than goingmore deeply into our problems, Buddhism teaches us how to disentangleour minds from them. There is, in the Buddhist view, more to the mindthan just neurosis. At the heart of all of us is the potential for kindness,generosity, and wisdom.

This is an approach that Western therapy has little experience with, butit is the foundation of Eastern wisdom. The contents of the mental streamare not as important as the consciousness that knows them. The mind soft-ens in meditation through the assumption of a particular mental posturecalled “bare attention,” in which impartial, nonjudgmental awareness istrained on whatever there is to observe. Problems are not distinguishedfrom solutions in this practice; the mind learns how to be with ambiguitywhile learning to be fully aware.

In my work as a therapist I have found it necessary to bring what I havelearned from Buddhism back into the psychological realm. The spirit that




XVII

Binswanger noticed ebbing out of the field is essential if true healing is totake place. People who are suffering want to change, but they do not knowhow. They feel, like Sally, that they have to go into their problems, or some-how get rid of them entirely. They want to analyze, or be analyzed, andthey want to love, or be loved. But they do not know that to bring about truehealing they have to learn how to see themselves as they truly are.

THE BUDDHIST PERSPECT IVE

“How does your interest in meditation make you different from a conven-tional therapist,” people wonder when they learn of my study of Buddhism.“Do you teach your clients to meditate?” they ask.

For a time I simply dodged the question, repeating a joke that one of mypatients relayed to me: “What is the difference between a Buddhist and anon-Buddhist? A non-Buddhist thinks there’s a difference.”

Buddhism taught me to let go of concepts and opinions and to breakdown constricting boundaries, not to create a new ideology. Meditationtaught me to be with whatever I was doing. It encouraged me to bemyself. It taught me to wash the dishes when I was washing the dishes,to walk when I walked, and to play with my children when I played withmy children, to be more fully in the moment, in the Now, engaged in theprocess of being alive. It was not about creating a new form better thanthe old form.

I like the story of the Zen master whose students were horrified to findhim eating his breakfast and reading the paper at the same time. “You taughtus to do one thing at a time!” they admonished him, “and now look at you!”

“When eating breakfast and reading the paper, just eat breakfast and readthe paper,” he shot back.

Meditation taught me to give myself over to my role as a therapist. Likethe Zen master, I did not have to look like I was always meditating, but Icould try to be as present as possible. When doing therapy, I was just doingtherapy. I did not assume that I was different from a non-Buddhist therapist.I certainly did not ordinarily teach my clients to meditate, although if theyasked me I would tell them who I thought a good teacher might be.



Yet as I considered the question, I realized that my answer was also a lit-tle disingenuous. The positive outlook of Buddhism does guide the way Iwork as a therapist. It molds my approach from the beginning and affectseverything from my goals to my method to my basic orientation. Buddhismwas with me as I made my way in psychotherapy, influencing all of mychoices as I developed my own style of working.

I was in the rather unique position of learning about Buddhism—both intheory and in practice—before I knew very much about anything else. Thiswas different from the usual mode in our culture, in which Buddhism isencountered as Other, and attempts are made to understand it through thefilters of our own systems of knowledge.

Still a college student, I was fairly naive when I first came upon theBuddha’s psychology. It did not seem alien to me—in fact, it made muchmore immediate sense than the first writings on psychoanalysis or behav-iorism that I had already studied in my first years at Harvard. While I wasinterested in becoming a therapist by this time, I did not know muchabout what it actually entailed. Only after immersing myself in Buddhismdid I decide to enter medical school to pursue training as a psychiatrist.My involvement with Buddhism predated the bulk of my education as apsychotherapist.

THE INTRINSIC-REAL ITY INST INCT

The core teaching of Buddhism is a psychological one. In his Four NobleTruths, the Buddha analyzed the human condition and taught the vehiclefor change. Experience is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness,he declared, and the cause of this pain is our own clinging or grasping aftercertainty and security. There are three types of clinging, said the Buddha:for pleasant sensory experiences, for “being,” and for “nonbeing.” The firstneeds relatively little explanation, it is equivalent in many ways to theFreudian sexual drive and involves the seeking after sensual gratification, butthe second two contain the heart of the Buddhist approach.

From the Buddhist perspective, there is another, more fundamental,instinct than the Freudian ones of sex and aggression. While it is some-


XVIII



times referred to as “ignorance,” it is called the intrinsic-reality instinct, thetendency to see a false and absolute identity in people and in things, tofalsely conclude they have an intrinsic reality, or essence, at their core. Itis the major illness of the human personality, the Buddha realized, to seethings as “something” or as “nothing.” The ego needs to concretize real-ity so it can be understood and managed, and this extends to our experi-ence of ourselves as well. We cling to “being,” and believe that our selvesare absolutely real, that they have self-identity, intrinsic reality; or weswing to the opposite extreme and cling to “nonbeing,” seeing ourselvesas nothing, empty, and unreal. But both the something and the nothing arewrong, the Buddha saw; they both precipitate out of our clinging for cer-tainty. Later Buddhist teachers and philosophers developed a “centralway” between something and nothing, and taught methods of training aware-ness to be able to open-handedly hold or maintain such an approach. Itis this teaching that provides a bridge between instinct and spirit, betweenFreud and Binswanger. It is the intrinsic-reality instinct, the belief in our-selves as somebody or as nobody, which has to be uprooted in order forspirit to be set free.

As I evolved my own style, as every therapist must do, I have come to seehow much this core insight of Buddhism influences the way that I work. Itgives me a hope and a method for my work that I would not have had oth-erwise. I know that if I can rest in the “central way”, if I can help people findtheir attachments to being and nonbeing, their own authentic selves—theirown Buddha nature—will shine through.

This book is, in one sense, a case study about how I came to dwell moreeasily in awareness, and, as such, I hope it may offer some insight about howothers may do the same. This book is also about the traditional Buddhistpath of insight, which makes it possible to live in accordance with change,as one’s truest self. Living in this way is a potential for all of us that emergesnaturally when we see ourselves as we actually are. We can change, it turnsout, not by trying to make our problems go away nor by going into themmore deeply, but by learning how to be more aware.


XIX



ALREADY FREE

I had a visit with an early teacher of mine recently, Ram Dass, at his homein northern California where he was recovering from a crippling stroke thathe had suffered the year before. Body and spirit were both much in evi-dence in our meeting. The visit reminded me of how much of my ownsearch had been inspired by him. The author of Be Here Now, and one of thepivotal figures of the sixties, Ram Dass was engaged in a process of physi-cal rehabilitation and speech therapy designed to bring his body back fromthe stroke. While his outward form was altered, his inner one was still veryfamiliar. He had trouble finding his words at times, but when he did, theyseemed to express his thoughts perfectly. He had not lost any of his innervitality or wisdom. He walked the length of his porch with the aid of awalker and then lowered himself into his wheelchair. I sat beside him on theporch, gazing into the distance at the leaves of the trees shimmering in theafternoon breeze. He asked me if I felt I had carved out some new territorybetween Buddhism and psychotherapy. “For myself, you mean?” I askedhim, knowing that he tended to be suspicious of the psychotherapeuticmodel and of the appropriation of spirituality by therapists. He indicatedthis was what he meant, and I, in turn, nodded my assent.

“Do you see them—” Ram Dass began, and then he paused. The breezeblew through his silence. “Already free,” he murmured, as I strained just abit to make sure I was hearing him properly. It took me a moment to puttogether what he was asking me; it was the only time that afternoon that Ihad trouble understanding him.

“Do I see my patients as already free?”He nodded. He knew the essence of the Buddhist approach. People

come to me seeking something, and I have to know that they are alreadyfree. “They are souls seeking God,” he said. “The game is to pretend withthem that they are lost and then help them rediscover their freedom.” Thetherapeutic relationship is a grown-up version of the child’s earliest gameof peek-a-boo.

Ram Dass’s insight was pivotal. Our freedom is already present within us,but we allow it to be obscured by our own clinging. It is as if we are playing


XX



hide-and-seek but we forget midway through that it is a game. We forgetwe are hiding and feel lost instead. The trick, as Ram Dass understood, isto open up the process of looking so that we can reconnect with the aware-ness that is already there.

As I sat on the porch in conversation with my old teacher, I touched onall of the contours of my own evolution. My earlier sense of being lost orlocked out of myself, yearning for intimacy, my discovery of Buddhism,my relationships with family, spiritual teachers, and therapists, and my pro-cessing of these experiences into my work all seemed to be of a piece. Time’sinexorable march surrounded us: Ram Dass was in a wheelchair. “Your hairis gray!” he had said as he greeted me, shaking his head and chuckling.There we sat, words and silence intermingling, old friends reminiscing, thewarmth of our feelings enlivening the lazy afternoon. “This was like a deli-cious appetizer,” said Ram Dass as I gathered myself to leave.

I was momentarily surprised by his analogy. “An appetizer?” I wonderedto myself. I was ready to wrap it up already, preparing to make my depar-ture. It was one of those times that seemed to encapsulate the trajectory ofan entire life, and, to me, it felt more like dessert than an hors d’oeuvre. ButRam Dass was catching me in my tendency to seek closure too precipi-tously. I was all too ready for nonbeing. He might be older and more frail,but he was not saying goodbye. We had just managed to find each other;I did not need to close it down already. I reconsidered my reaction.

An appetizer sounded just fine to me.


XXI





PAR T ON ETH E C EN T RA L WAY

I was like a mad child, long lost his old mother,

Never could find her, though she was with him always!

But now it seems I’m about to find that kind old Ama,

Since Big Brother Relativity hints where she hides,

I think, “Yes, yes!”—then, “No, no!”—then, “Could it be, really!”

These various subjects and objects are my Mother’s smiling face!

These births, deaths, and changes are my Mother’s lying words!

My undeceiving Mother has deceived me!

My only hope of refuge is Big Brother Relativity!

—Jankya Rolway Dorje, Discovery of Mother Voidness

(translated by Robert A. F. Thurman)





CHAP T E R 1GO ING ON B E I NG

There is a story that has kept popping up in my work over the yearsthat embodies much of what I have learned about how people change.It is a story that has served a number of different functions as I have

wrestled with the sometimes competing worldviews of Buddhism and psy-chotherapy, but it ultimately points the way toward their integration. It isone of the tales of Nasruddin—a Sufi figure who lived around the thir-teenth century, who was an amalgam of wise man and fool. I have some-times identified with Nasruddin and sometimes been puzzled by him. Hehas the peculiar gift of acting out our basic confusion and at the same timeopening us up to our deeper wisdom.

I first heard this story many years ago from one of my meditation teach-ers, Joseph Goldstein, who used it as an example of how people search forhappiness in inherently fleeting, and therefore unsatisfactory, pleasant feel-ings. The story is about how friends came upon Nasruddin, searching out-side on the ground one night, crawling around on his hands and kneesunder a lamppost.

“What are you looking for?” they asked him.“I’ve lost the key to my house,” he replied.They all got down to help him look, but after a fruitless time of search-

ing, someone thought to ask him where he had lost the key in the firstplace.

“In the house,” Nasruddin answered.“Then why are you looking on the ground?” he is asked.“Because there is more light here,” Nasruddin replied.



I suppose I must identify with Nasruddin to have quoted this story sooften. Searching for my keys is something I can understand. It puts me intouch with a sense of estrangement, of yearning, that I’ve had quite a bit ofin my life, a feeling that I used to equate with an old reggae song by JimmyCliff called “Sitting in Limbo.”

In my first book I used this parable as a way of talking about people’sattachment to psychotherapy and their fears of spirituality. Therapists areused to looking in certain familiar places for the key to people’s unhappi-ness, I maintained. They are like Nasruddin looking on the ground, whenthey might profit more from looking inside their own homes.

In my next book, I returned to this story obliquely when I describedlocking myself out of my running car while trying to leave a meditationretreat that I had just finished. I knew I had locked my keys in the car (itwas idling away right in front of me, for goodness sake!), but I still feltcompelled to look on the ground for them just in case I might somehowbe miraculously saved. Being locked out of my car, with it running onwithout me, seemed like an apt metaphor for something akin to the titleof my first book, Thoughts without a Thinker. Something like a car without adriver, or, in this case, a driver without his car. Humbled by my own inep-titude, I felt closer to Nasruddin in my second pass through his story.Rather than seeing him simply in his foolish mode, as a stand-in for psy-chotherapists looking in the wrong place for the key, I felt sympathy forNasruddin, allied with him searching in vain for what he knew was notthere.

But it was not until some time later, when I came upon the same story insomeone else’s work, that I could appreciate it in yet another way. In a mar-velous book entitled Ambivalent Zen, Lawrence Shainberg told how this sameparable captivated his imagination for ten years. He, too, thought that heunderstood it. The moral, he concluded, is to look where the light is sincedarkness is the only threat. But he determined one day to ask his JapaneseZen master (a wonderfully engaging character as described by Shainberg)for his interpretation.

After Shainberg described the story to him, his master appeared to giveit no thought, but sometime later the roshi brought it up again.


4



“So, Larry-san, what’s Nasruddin saying?” the Zen master asked.“I asked you, Roshi.”“Easy,” he said. “Looking is the key.”1

There was something eminently satisfying about this answer; besideshaving the pithiness that we expect from Zen, it made me look at the entiresituation in a fresh way. Shainberg’s roshi hit the nail on the head. Nasrud-din’s activity was not in vain after all; he was demonstrating somethingmore fundamental than initially was apparent. The key was just a pretext foran activity that had its own rationale.

Freud evolved one way of looking; the Buddha discovered another. Theyhad important similarities and distinctive differences, but they were eachmotivated by the need to find a more authentic way of being, a truer self.

SOMEBODY VS. NOBODY

I had the sense very early of feeling lost and cut off from myself. Thisfeeling motivated my spiritual and psychological search, but it also had thepotential to make me feel terrible about myself. In my discovery ofBuddhism, I found a method of cutting through the self-estrangement thatso bothered me. I found a new way to look at myself.

In the 1970s, there was a saying in Buddhist circles, “You have to besomebody before you can be nobody.” This was a popular statementbecause of how clearly it summed up a very obvious phenomenon. Manyof the people who were drawn to Buddhism were attracted by the ideas of“no-self” and “emptiness” that are central to the Buddha’s psychology. Butthese are subtle concepts, difficult to understand correctly; in the TibetanBuddhist tradition, for example, monks often study the scriptures thatexplain them for years and years before even starting to meditate. In theWest, people who were suffering from alienation or from spiritual and psy-chological distress often mistook the Buddhist descriptions for an affirma-tion of their psychological emptiness. “You have to be somebody before youcan be nobody” was a way of telling them that their psychological work ofraising self-esteem or creating an integrated or cohesive self had to pre-cede efforts at seeing through the ego. In many cases, this was indeed sound


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advice; but the categorization of people into the two categories of “some-body” and “nobody” created another set of misunderstandings.

When the Buddha taught, he asserted both “somebody” and “nobody”were mistakes; that the true vision of who and what we are involves look-ing without resorting to the instinct of intrinsic reality. “Somebody” wasthe equivalent of clinging to being, while “nobody” was the same as cling-ing to nonbeing. In either case, the mind’s need for certainty was short-changing reality. The correct view, the Buddha perceived, lies somewherein between. The self-centered attitude is as much of a problem as the self-abnegating one. We can be proud or empty; in either case the problem liesin our sense of self-certainty.

Rather than blaming my upbringing, or other people, or instincts beyondmy control, this view offered an approach that taught me to work first andforemost with my own reactions to things. When I thought I was somebodyI reacted one way, and when I thought I was nobody I reacted another. Ineither case I was obscuring my own awareness. Removing these obstaclesopened me to myself—not as something or nothing, but as a unique, sin-gular, and relational process. I learned to live more in the moment—notputting up a false front and not focusing only on what was expected of me,but in touch with a more spontaneous, creative, and responsive self. LikeNasruddin, I was indeed searching for something. Learning to be, insteadof react, turned out to be the key.

Meditation was the vehicle that opened me up to myself, but psy-chotherapy, in the right hands, has similar potential. It was actually throughmy own therapy and my own studies of Western psychoanalytic thoughtthat I began to understand what meditation made possible. As compellingas the language of Buddhism was for me, I needed to figure things out inWestern language as well. Psychotherapy came after meditation in my life,but it reinforced what meditation had shown me. Change did not comefrom trying to get rid of my problems or from going into them more deeply.It came from accepting what was true about myself and working from there.In exposing my chronic ways of reacting, psychotherapy showed me wheremy blind spots were. It sometimes took the interaction with another per-son to reveal them to me, but the results were similar to what I had glimpsed


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from sitting on the cushion: As I learned to question my own identifications,I came to be able to live more fully in the moment, and I felt closer to whoI really was.

THE HERE-AND-NOW

My own experiences in psychotherapy were with two Gestalt therapists inrapid succession, one in Boston when I was going to medical school, andone in New York where I moved after my internship. They were friends, theformer having been a student of the latter, and my work with one mergedinto my work with the other. I used to ask my Boston therapist, MichaelVincent Miller, where he had learned his craft. He seemed so adept at usingwhatever was happening in the moment to show me how anxiety caused meto clamp down on just the quality of self-awareness that the Buddha har-nessed in his process of liberation. He used to tell me about his teacher inNew York, Isadore From, whom he said had taught him most of what heknew about Gestalt.

Gestalt therapy is an adaptation of psychoanalysis that focuses on the“here-and-now” of the therapy encounter rather than a probing of the past.Many of its ideas have influenced mainstream analytic thought by now, butits great expertise is in working with the nuts and bolts of the personalrelationship between therapist and patient. As developed most precisely inthe writings of the sociologist-turned-therapist Paul Goodman in the 1950s,Gestalt therapy focuses on the deficits in ego-functioning that keep a per-son estranged from both herself and other people. While the emphasis on“ego” at first glance appears to be the antithesis of Buddhism, in actualitythis approach requires a kind of meditation in action.

In Gestalt therapy the natural or satisfying thing is thought to be “con-tact”—contact between one person and another, between an individual andher environment, or a person and his inner world. Life unfolds in a seriesof meetings between an individual and his surroundings, which take placeat what Gestalt therapy has called the “contact-boundary” of experience.This meeting is sometimes disturbed and sometimes not. When it is dis-turbed, it is usually through some kind of chronic inhibition or restriction


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that the person puts on herself without knowing that she is doing so. Thetherapist’s job is to slow things down enough so that it becomes obvioushow someone is getting in her own way, in order that she may learn to liftthe restriction, if she so desires.

When I was in treatment my therapist often stopped me in mid-streamto ask me to repeat what I was saying and tell it to him. I was always offendedto be interrupted, and often felt he was not really listening if he could stopme like that, but over time I came to respect what he was after. Talking tohim directly made me more anxious but revealed how difficult it was torelate openly. The point of stopping and doing it over again was to dis-cover how I got in my own way, how I shut myself down without beingaware. Once I could see what I was doing to myself, I could start to change.I would not have known how I was avoiding him, or even that I was avoid-ing him, if he had not stopped me to request that I start over; I would havecontinued to be caught up in my story and restricted by anxiety withoutknowing that I was so restricted. Whatever I was saying always turned outto be less important than how I was having trouble saying it.

FREE ING THE EGO

This is how meditation and therapy began to come together for me. Myown therapists were not students of meditation, but this did not stop themfrom being able to focus on the here-and-now with a precision and disci-pline that I both admired and envied. They engaged in a way that I washungry for. Here was a psychotherapy that was not so much a probing ofthe past as it was a probing of the present. What was getting in the way ofmy ability to be open, of my ability to communicate, of my presence in thehere-and-now? What was stopping me from being myself? Usually, it wouldturn out to be some notion of how I should be, some image of perfection,some protective sense of embarrassment or shame that caused me to reactagainst the way things actually were. These feelings had led to copingstrategies that had taken on a life of their own. It was like assuming a pos-ture that becomes so habitual that it is no longer noticed. I had developedways of dealing with my anxiety that now ran on without me.


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When I would speak to Isadore about something that was bothering me,for example, I would often preface it with a phrase such as, “You know, partof me wishes that I could try that again.”

“You don’t have parts,” he would invariably reply, again skipping overthe content of whatever I was talking about to focus on the way in which Iwas expressing myself.

At first, this sort of comment made no sense to me. I was not even awareof having prefaced my remarks in such a way. “What are you talking about?”I would wonder. “Did I say anything about having parts?” But gradually Ibegan to see how regularly I made use of this kind of language. My ten-dency to divide myself up into conflicting “parts” was a sign of a distancingmaneuver that I was engaged in with my own self. By saying “part of me,”I was subtly pushing away whatever I was feeling, reducing it to a subset ora fraction of myself and endowing it with an absolute identity. In the midstof these subsets I felt unsure and at times unreal. “You are a whole person,”my therapist was trying to tell me, “not a fragment of one.” Being a wholeperson did not mean having no inconsistencies, but it did mean being ableto take responsibility for all of what I was feeling. I could want things thatconflicted with each other, but then it was up to me to reach a conclusionabout what to do. Splitting myself into parts that were in conflict with eachother did not do anything to further my situation, it only tended to para-lyze me.

My chronic ways of reacting to new situations came in patterns that hada history dating from childhood. I tended to read situations for signs ofrejection and then close myself up to forestall it. I could reach out, but thenwithdraw very quickly if I thought I would be disappointed. I was an expertat figuring out what was expected of me and giving people what theywanted, but I did not always acknowledge what I wanted. As I began to takepossession of myself, exposing those coping mechanisms to the light ofawareness, pivotal memories naturally arose that showed where some ofthat behavior had originated. Anxiety, I discovered, “is a dread of one’s owndaring.”2 But these insights into my past came from attention to the pres-ent; they were inadvertent byproducts of a willingness to examine my ownfears of engagement. Their recovery, by themselves, was not what seemed


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to be healing. They were more like icing on the cake, affirmations of anability to relate with less fear and reactivity.

I remember once trying to explain the Buddhist view of self to Isadore.In Buddhism, there is said to be no fixed, intrinsic identity; only a flow withno one behind it. Isadore had no problem with the Buddhist view. Gestalttherapy also sees the world as a flow; as a continual unfolding, a successionof meeting places at the contact-boundaries of experience. The “ego” is theindividual vehicle for carrying out these meetings, but it has no intrinsicidentity either. A healthy ego initiates, approaches, makes contact, and dis-solves, only to begin the cycle again. A disturbed ego gets in its own wayand interferes with healthy contact, perpetuating its own reality at theexpense of the interaction. When I was having trouble speaking to Isadoredirectly, my ego was actually more active than when I learned to relateopenly. In those circumstances where my ego did not dissolve, I was leftwith a sense of deficiency, having failed to accomplish the intimacy orrelationship that I was naturally seeking. An ego that gets in its own waynever gets to transparency; the result is a person contracted around his ownsense of inadequacy. A positive sense of self emerges only when the egoallows itself to melt away.

Therapy showed me, as if under a microscope, how my ego was not free,how it was hung up on feelings of unworthiness that had stymied me formuch of my life. By asking me to do such simple things as talk directly, orchange my language as I spoke, my therapists put me in a position to staredirectly into those deficits, instead of avoiding them. The ego could beundone only by knowing itself. When it did, it was happy to recede. Myfeelings of lack were windows into my lost potential. When I learned howto take their appearance as an opportunity to make contact instead of anexcuse to avoid it, I was well on the way to relief.

GOING ON BEING

In psychotherapy I found an interpersonal parallel to meditation, but it wasnot until I came across the writings of the British child analyst D. W. Win-nicott that I found the raison d’être for such an approach. Winnicott had the


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theory that put together much of my experience for me. He wrote evoca-tively of what he called a young child’s “going on being,” by which hemeant the uninterrupted flow of authentic self. It was this flow that I recov-ered, in different ways, from both meditation and psychotherapy. In Win-nicott’s schema, there is nothing so precious, or even sacred, as thecontinuity of a person’s capacity to go on being. If a young child has toomuch to deal with (Winnicott’s classic examples of early trauma are usuallyof maternal anxiety or depression), then she is forced into a reactive modehe called a caretaker self that removes her from her own experience, forc-ing her to cope prematurely with the needs of another. This interrupts thechild’s own continuity, producing gaps or breaks that Winnicott liked to call“threats of annihilation.” Such a child is never given enough room todevelop a continuous and integrated sense of herself. She is forced into areactive mode that “cuts across” her going on being.3

I felt an immediate affinity for Winnicott’s descriptions. The fragmentedsense of myself, in which I was divided into “parts,” seemed to be a resultof a process much like Winnicott described. I was good at figuring out whatwas expected of me, at reading the environment for clues, but I had trou-ble staying with my own experience. Both meditation and psychotherapyreturned a mysterious and invigorating essence to my experience, an intan-gible quality that was both energizing and enlivening. In meditation, I expe-rienced this as joy or rapture, but in my life it felt more like aliveness orvitality.

Winnicott wrote about this essence in a way that tied a good deal of myexperience together. He could speak from the perspective of an infant, achild, a parent, or a therapist, and most of what he said was in agreementwith a Buddhist understanding. Going on being does not need to connoteany fixed entity of self; but it does imply a stream of unimpeded aware-ness, ever evolving, yet with continuity, uniqueness, and integrity. It carrieswith it the sense of the unending meeting places of interpersonal experi-ence, convergences that are not blocked by a reactive or contracted ego.Winnicott supported the obvious sense of an ongoing individual presence,but he was suspicious of a self that was too knowable. The known self is afalse one, he would assert, consolidated only for the purpose of managing


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a malignant environment. And the shadow of that false self is disturbing andoppressive negative space: the emptiness and unreality that can seem evenmore real than life itself.

Going on being implies an intrinsic but elusive process of self-discoveryand self-creation, akin to what in Gestalt therapy is called “creative adjust-ment,” in which inherited potential flowers into full expression through theactive participation of the individual. In most Buddhist cosmologies, theanalogy for this blooming of potential is the lotus flower growing in theshallow muck of a pond. Given the right circumstances, the lotus burstsforth in all of its splendor, just as our minds naturally flower if brought outfrom the influence of reactivity.

Winnicott’s notion of going on being is the Western equivalent of thelotus. As the representation of each individual’s potential, going on beingimplies the capacity to live in a fully aware and creative state unimpeded byconstraints or expectations. Winnicott describes such a state throughout hiswriting, employing imagery not often found in the language of psycho-analysis. He talks of therapists and mothers in the same breath, as benevo-lent forces with destructive potential. He warns that well-intentionedinterpretations in therapy can be intrusive and might frighten people away,just as he warns mothers to let their babies find the nipple, not to just forceit into their mouths. Patients have to find their own meaning in the inter-action with the therapist, not just be fed interpretations.

PICKING THE LOCK

In Buddhism, the refusal to be caught in self-certainty is equivalent to thegreatest insight of all, that of the “emptiness” of things. In the iconographyof Buddhism, in fact, this emptiness (or shunyata) is also represented by themother, because they both, in a way, make everything possible. If thingshave no intrinsic or absolute reality, then everything must be relational.Emptiness is like a web or a matrix that makes one thing dependent onanother. Understanding shunyata is not a way of negating the reality ofthings, of withdrawing from the world or claiming that nothing matters. Itis not a nothingness or a void. It is a way of reclaiming the sense of going


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on being that Winnicott extolled. The literal image behind the term ofshunyata is that of a pregnant womb: empty, nourishing, fertile, and con-taining the entire world. Its root is in the Sanskrit word shvi, meaning “toswell,” like a seed or a balloon. Just as Winnicott held up the mother as theexemplar of what the mind is capable of, so do Buddhists see the potentialfor transforming the mind through the experience of shunyata. The mindcan become more womblike, not in the classical Freudian way of hysteria,but along the lines of Winnicott’s theory, able to encompass the individual’sgoing on being.

I have one more insight into the fable of Nasruddin. It came through astory in a collection of Jack Kornfield’s entitled After the Ecstasy, the Laundry,4

a discussion of how people integrate their spiritual understandings in reallife. Jack tells of a Muslim man who was put into prison for a crime he didnot commit. A friend came to visit and smuggled him a present, a prayerrug. The jailed man was disappointed, he did not want a prayer rug, hewanted a hacksaw or knife or something else that would somehow aid hisescape. But after some time he decided to make use of the rug, studying thebeautiful and intricate patterns as he did his daily prayers. One day hestarted to see an interesting design in the carpet, a diagram of the internalmechanism of the lock to his cell. He picked the lock and was free. As Nas-ruddin foretold, looking was indeed the key.

Recovering the ability to go on being is like seeing the blueprint in therug. We feel cut off, locked out, estranged, or imprisoned, and we yearn forrelease. We have all kinds of ideas about what will heal, about what wehave to do to change. But the major obstacle is that we do not know howto look at ourselves as process. We can only imagine somebody or nobody.Yet neither of these options will bring us to freedom: both imprison us.

Like the man in the jail staring at the floor of his cell, everything weneed is right in front of us. We don’t have to change to awaken, we haveonly to awaken to change.


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Documents

Going on Being: Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and ... On Being Book... · GOING ON BEING LIFE AT THE CROSSROADS OF BUDDHISM AND PSYCHOTHERAPY ... life at the crossroads of Buddhism