9 No-Self and the emptying God: dwelling in the emptying place
MELVIN E. MILLER
10 Empty rowboats: no-blame and other therapeutic effects of no-self in long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis
POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH
11 Anxiety, struggle, and egoic process
BRUCE C. TIFT
PART V Psychotherapy practice
12 Polarity processing: Self/No-Self, the Transcendent Function, and wholeness
DEON VAN ZYL
13 Stop running
DALE MATHERS
14 Mindfulness and the technology of healing: lessons from Western practice
CHRIS MACE
15 Dying to be born: Transformative Surrender within analytical psychology from a clinician’s perspective GORDON WALLACE
PART VI Mysticism and spirituality
16 The experience of self in Zen and Christian mysticism
DAISUKE SHIMIZU
17 Self/No-Self in the therapeutic dialogue according to Martin Buber’s dialogue philosophy
TAMAR KRON
18 Muso¯ Soseki (1275–1351): the development of Zen culture out of conflicts
SHOJI MURAMOTO
PART VII Myth and fairy tale
19 The image of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata emerging from the therapist at a crucial point in therapy
KONOYU NAKAMURA
20 The healing properties of a fairy tale
DAVID L. HART
21 Breaking the spells of self: how insights from fairy tales and Buddhist psychology can be applied in therapeutic practice
JAMES MATHEWS GRANT
PART VIII Re-introduction
22 Oscillations: reload
PAUL C. COOPER
Index
List of figures
The ordinary mental field The ordinary self/other world of the I–Me–Mine The mental field of internal absorption with sensate loss The mental field of insight-wisdom (kensho-satori) Parallel universes
60 61 62 63 64
List of contributors
Osamu Ando, MD, PhD, is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Hanazono University and President of the Japanese Association for Transpersonal Psychology/Psychiatry. He is the author of Psychiatry of Meditation, Buddhism as Psychotherapy, and Zen Psychotherapy (in Japanese). James H. Austin, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Neurology, University of Colorado Health Science Center. In his scholarly writings he has attempted to integrate and synthesize the significant scientific progress made in understanding the neurophysiological underpinnings of Zen experience. Austin’s explorations of this topic began with Zen and the Brain, and have continued with two sequels: Zen-Brain Reflections and Selfless Insight (2009). Paul C. Cooper, MS, LP, serves as Dean of Training and is on the faculty at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, USA. He serves on the Board of Directors of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education. He is the author of numerous award-winning poems and articles. He edited Into the Mountain Stream: Psychotherapy and Buddhist Experience (2007: Jason Aronson). He maintains a private practice in Manhattan and in Westchester, NY. James Mathews Grant, PhD, is a psychotherapist in private practice in Boston, MA. In 1986 he founded the Theravision Institute for Transpersonal Psychotherapist Training. He has taught courses on the relationship of spirituality, creativity, and psychotherapy in the Counseling Psychology Graduate School of Lesley University, meditation classes at the Boston Center For Esoteric Arts and Sciences, and Clinical Training Workshops at the Kantor Family Institute. He is a transpersonal therapist specializing in applying meditation principles to clinical practice. Currently, he is writing a systematic presentation of Open Psychotherapy. Before becoming a therapist, he had several plays produced as Playwright in Residence
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at Theatre Workshop in Boston. He is focused on the study of Sutric, Tantric, and Dzogchen forms of Tibetan Buddhism. Robert Jingen Gunn, DMin, PhD, is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, a practicing Zen Buddhist, and a Protestant pastor in the United Church of Christ. He is a lecturer at the Union Theological Seminary in Psychiatry and Religion and is the author of Journeys into Emptiness: Do¯ gen, Merton and Jung and the Quest for Transformation (2000: Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ). David L. Hart, PhD, is a Jungian analyst with a Diploma from the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich and Doctor of Psychology from Zurich University, 1955. He is the author of The Water of Life: Spiritual Renewal in the Fairy Tale (2001: University Press of America) and of numerous articles in Jungian journals. He is currently working on a memoir of his experiences at the (then) newly founded original Jung Institute and of his encounters with C. G. Jung and the many gifted teachers there. Tamar Kron, PhD, is head of the clinical psychology graduate program, School of Behavioral Sciences, at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, Israel. She is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst. Recent publications include: Kron, T., and Avny, N. (2003) ‘Psychotherapists’ dreams about their patients’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 48(3), 317–339; Kron, T., and Brosh, A. (2003) ‘Can dreams during pregnancy predict postpartum depression?,’ Dreaming, 13(2), 67–82; and Kron, T. (2004) Us, Adam and Eve; Myths and Psychology of Couple Relationship [in Hebrew], (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad). Chris Mace, MD, FRCPsych, is Consultant Psychotherapist to Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust and Associate Professor in Psychotherapy at the University of Warwick. He chairs the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ psychotherapy faculty. His recent publications include the Routledge handbook Mindfulness and Mental Health: Therapy, Theory and Science (2007). Barry Magid, MD, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He is also the founding Zen teacher of the Ordinary Mind Zendo, having received Dharma Transmission from Charlotte Joko Beck, and is the author of Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis (2002: Wisdom) and Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide (2008: Wisdom). Dale Mathers, MB BS, MRCPsych, is a Jungian analyst in London. He directed the Student Counselling Service at the London School of Economics, attends the Theravada class at the Buddhist Society, London, and is author of An Introduction to Meaning and Purpose in Analytical Psychology (2001: Routledge).
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Melvin E. Miller, PhD, has been involved with philosophy, narrative, and Eastern religions throughout his adult life. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He is presently Professor of Psychology and Director of Doctoral Training at Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, USA. Publications include: The Psychology of Mature Spirituality (edited with Polly Young-Eisendrath; 2000: Routledge). He has a private psychoanalytic practice. Shoji Muramoto, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies. He arranged, in collaboration with Polly YoungEisendrath, the 1999 conference on Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Kyoto, leading to the publication of Awakening and Insight co-edited with her (2000: Routledge). His main work is Jung and Faust: The Unconscious and the Western Intellectual History from Jinbun-shoin (1993). Konoyu Nakamura, PhD, is the Chair of the Department of Psychology of Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka, Japan and is in clinical practice in Kyoto as a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist. Recent works include: ‘Struggles among Japanese women with conservative gender roles flooded with “ideal” feminine images through commercialism,’ Psychotherapy and Politics International, 4(1), 55–61 (2006); ‘The image emerging: the therapist’s vision at a crucial point of therapy,’ in L. Huskinson (ed.), Dreaming the Myth Onwards: New Directions in Jungian Therapy and Thought (2008: New York: Routledge). Reggie Pawle, PhD, is Professor of Cross-Cultural Psychology at Kansai Gaidai University, Hirakata-shi, Japan and a Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan. He has been a Zen practitioner since 1974 in the USA and since 1990 with Sekkei Harada Roshi, Hosshinji Monastery, Obama, Japan. His publications include: ‘The Psychology of Zen,’ Seishin Ryoho: The Japanese Journal of Psychotherapy, 30(1), 17–23 (2004). Stanley G. Perelman, PhD, is a Jungian analyst practicing in Pittsburgh, USA. He is a professional member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association in New York. He is a long-time practitioner of meditation and is a student in the Bon lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He has given seminars and talks on Buddhism, on dreams, and on working with personality disorders. Daisuke Shimizu, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Ethics, and the Philosophy of Religion at Hanazono University, Japan. He has practiced Zen meditation under Kajitani Sonin Roshi of Shokoku-ji. He is the author of Nami soku umi: Jaeger Koun no shinpishiso to zen (The Wave is the Sea: Christian Mysticism and Zen in Willigis Ko’un Jaeger; Tokyo: nombre-sha) and
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Freiheit und Zweck: Kants Grundlegung der Ethik in zwei Phasen (Freedom and Purpose: Kant’s Grounding for Ethics in Two Phases; Wien: WUVUniversitaetsverlag). Bruce C. Tift, MA, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and has been in private practice in Boulder, Colorado, since 1979. He has been a student of Vajrayana Buddhism since 1975 and was a senior faculty member in the Contemplative Psychology and the Transpersonal Counseling departments at Naropa University, Colorado, for 24 years. Deon van Zyl, DPhil, is Former Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Pretoria. He is currently in private practice as a Clinical Psychologist and management consultant. He has received numerous academic merit and research awards in South Africa, and spent a year in the USA on a post-doctoral grant from the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. He is a member of the International Association for Jungian Studies, and a keen Vipassana practitioner. Gordon Wallace, PhD in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is a Jungian-oriented psychologist whose private practice in Canada specializes in individuals undergoing midlife challenges. His current clinical interests continue to include the Transformative Surrender experience as well as countertransference processes explored through mindfulness within the therapeutic encounter. Sodo Yasunaga Roshi trained as a Zen monk at Tenryu-ji monastery from 1978 to 1993, and is a successor of Hirata Seiko Roshi. Since 2001 he has been Professor of Zen Studies at Hanazono University. Interests include the Buddhist–Christian dialogue and the Hakuin koan system. Publications include studies of the Zen texts Biyan lu and Kogokoku ron. Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD, is a Jungian analyst and psychologist. She is Consultant for Leadership Development at Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, USA and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Vermont. In full-time practice in central Vermont, she has published fourteen books that have been translated into twenty languages. With Terence Dawson, she is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jung. Her newest book is The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance.
Acknowledgements and permissions
All the authors would like to give a special thanks to our courteous and generous hosts in Japan – the President, the faculty, and the students of Hanazono University, Kyoto. We gratefully thank our interpreters and translators: Thomas Kirchner, MA, MEd, practiced as a Zen monk from 1971 to 1984, and is presently on the staff of the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism at Hanazono University, Kyoto. His areas of research include the Linji lu, the Zen koan, and the Zen Master Muso Soseki. Publications include Entangling Vines (a koan collection) and Zenso ni natta Amerikajin (in Japanese). Adam Catt, MA, is a PhD candidate at Otani University in Kyoto, studying canonical Indian languages and Indian Buddhist texts on praxis. His interests include Japanese language study and Vipassana meditation. Harold and Jill Abilock, for addtional support with interpretation. And, for editorial support and encouragement: Jane Harris and Kate Hawes.
Cover image By Aaron Miller, BA in Fine Art, MA in Media Study and Computer Music. Artist and producer of interactive exhibits for art and educational museums. Produced installations and performances at the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre, and the Seattle Art Museum. Currently lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Permissions Routledge and Princeton University Press, for permission to quote from the Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1953–1973) eds Sir H. Read, M. Fordham,
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Acknowledgements and permissions
G. Adler, and W. McGuire, 20 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and © 1971 Princeton University Press (1999 renewed PUP). Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Chapter 15: Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox, Bear & Co., Rochester, VT 05767 Copyright © 1983 Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, Inc. www.bearandCompanyBooks.com Chapter 20 by David L. Hart was originally published as Hart, David L. (1980). ‘The Healing Properties of a Fairy Tale’. Psychological Perspectives: A Semiannual Journal of Jungian Thought, 11(1), 19–28. © 1980 and reproduced with kind permission of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business, Abingdon, UK. Chapter 22: Paul Cooper’s original poems first appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health, 43(3), p. 242, used by permission of Springer Business and Science Media.
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Part I Introduction
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Ch1 Buddhism and psychotherapy A dialogue Melvin E. Miller
A mutually engaging conversation between Buddhism and psychoanalysis has been active for the past few decades. The famous Zen Scholar from Kyoto, Professor Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s visit to Carl Jung in 1958 in Zurich (cf. Muramoto 1998), and D. T. Suzuki’s discussions through the early 1950s with the California Zen communities were amongst the first murmurings of what was soon to become an exceptionally fertile dialogue (Suzuki et al. 1960). From our present vantage, this dialogue appears to have grown widely, be thriving and moving inexorably into the future. Sparks of cross-fertilization between Buddhism and psychoanalysis were ignited long before the current upsurge of interest; in fact, well before the Hisamatsu–Jung encounter. Some of the earliest interest in Buddhism exhibited by a Western psychologist is reflected in Thompson’s (1924) essay ‘Psychology in primitive Buddhism.’ Thompson was a Chicago psychoanalyst who developed a keen interest in Buddhism, particularly in its concept of karma. He is probably best known for an article he wrote which compared Freud’s notion of psychic determinism with the law of karma, revealing similarities in how the disciplines understood the untoward effects of the various dimensions of desire. Shortly after this seminal article, Franz Alexander (1931), another Chicago analyst, a member of Freud’s London inner circle, and a formative thinker in psychosomatic medicine, weighed in on the debate over Buddhist matters with an extraordinary and potentially controversial article on the complex psychology manifested in Buddhist training. In the 1950s and 1960s, other psychoanalysts were excited about the convergences they found between the practices of psychoanalysis and Buddhism (Horney 1952/1987; Fromm 1960). Their writings are evidence of the growing interest in the confluence of these topics, and hint of the exciting dialogue that was to follow – a dialogue with roots emanating from the discussions of Hisamatsu and Jung. Ponder for a moment what the exchange between these two formidable thinkers must have been like. What made it such a watershed event? Perhaps its greatest significance is that it occurred at all, as it was inaugural to a long and remarkable series of such historical encounters. Notwithstanding the critical timing and vital significance of the meeting, there were a few problems
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surrounding it; likely contributing to an array of misunderstandings arising in the aftermath of their seminal discussions. For example, first there are the formidable difficulties arising when one attempts to translate the fundamental terms (the lexicon) of any discipline. Second, we also know that there were at least two versions of the encounter (cf. Meckel and Moore 1992; Muramoto 1998). Third, both participants may have pitched their levels of expectation and questioning too high: as if these agreements about basic terminology had already been made clear. The major controversy between them centered round Hisamatsu taking Western psychology to task for its overemphasis on the self! In retrospect, it seems he was determined to understand the differences between the Western (Jungian) notion of self and the true self of Zen. But was there more to it? Hisamatsu emphasized the true self of Zen was without form or substance. Jung compared his own notion of the authentic self to the Hindu notion of Atman. Hisamatsu was quick in his rebuttal, noting the commonly accepted notion of Atman contained traces of substance. Troubled by this response, Jung argued Hisamatsu was splitting theoretical hairs by articulating elusive ontological, if not metaphysical, distinctions. Jung further indicated his affront to Hisamatsu’s ontological stance by defensively retorting there was insufficient evidence to substantiate these notions. In exasperation, Jung exclaimed, “Fundamentally, I don’t know” (Muramoto 1998: 46). Perhaps we witness in their discourse differences that inevitably come to the fore in any discussion contrasting a clinical, experiential approach with a religious and philosophical one about formulation of metapsychological and theologically informed concepts. Seeking to resolve such differences seems to be exactly what prompted Hisamatsu’s visit to Zurich. Similar motivations gave the authors represented in this book good reason to make our recent journey to Kyoto. There it became clear the topics under discussion by Hisamatsu and Jung are as alive today as they were in 1958. The discourse between these two conceptual masters fueled the emerging exchange between the two disciplines; a tribute to the lasting impact of their shared interests and common vision. But, as in all good debates, inevitable points of departure eventually emerge, many of which are addressed here; for example, self and no-self, the laws of karma, the role of striving and desire in suffering. Though one of our discourses is very old and the other relatively young, Buddhism and psychoanalysis are considered today as both belonging to Wisdom Traditions. Neither are ‘grand narratives’ or ‘theories of everything’ – both are attempts to understand what suffering is, and how it may be brought to an end. Both invite their followers to explore the depths of psyche or mind, exhorting them to face the difficult and sometimes frightening psychological experiences that emerge during any in-depth exploration of mental process. Our shared concerns, and their relevance to the profound struggles of contemporary times, set the stage for the 2006 Kyoto Conference and the collaborative effort leading to this book.
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Our meeting was called ‘The Kyoto 2006 Conference on Self and No-Self in Psychotherapy and Buddhism.’ We convened for the primary purpose of deepening the exciting exchange of ideas begun in 1999 at the first Kyoto Conference on Buddhism and Psychotherapy. The proceedings of that meeting were published in Awakening and Insight edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Shoji Muramoto (2002). Our interdisciplinary group assembled at Hanazono University in Kyoto, Japan, in 2006. This venue is unique, being the only Zen University in Japan. We met with the express purpose of keeping this vibrant dialogue fresh with the cross-fertilization of shared and controversial concepts. As a continuation of the Hisamatsu–Jung debates, we certainly wanted to keep the spirit of their discourse alive, and hoped to keep the evocative ideas emerging from the 1999 meeting at the forefront. Thus, within the context of that controversy, our volume includes at least three chapters that highlight the debate over the ontological status of the self. Reggie Pawle brings to the volume the results of his interviews with Japanese Zen Masters who variously report on their understanding of the meaning of (experience of ) no-self. Ando and Miller both discuss historical and theoretical perspectives on the self vs. no-self debate while referencing the legendary position on the true nature of the self articulated by the early Zen Master Do¯ gen. Do¯ gen (1985), of course, constantly exhorts us to “forget the self ” and reminds his readers of the perennial benefits that emerge when one is able to do so. Other parallels emerged as well. Hisamatsu and Jung questioned the ability of a philosophical/psychological school of thought ever relating in a meaningful way with a religious perspective. Robert Gunn’s chapter addresses this perennial question in a fresh, unfettered manner. We saw both Hisamatsu and Jung grappling with the roles, functions, and meanings of the conscious and unconscious minds. These subtle matters of consciousness and its vicissitudes are addressed both directly and indirectly by many authors in this book. In short, through both the Kyoto Conference and this volume, we wanted to elevate the debate among participating religious leaders, practitioners, and academicians to an even higher level, and we were bold enough to hope we could promote these life-transforming notions to the general public. One shared belief informing this activity is the notion that the actual process of meeting and discussing such things is essential not only to the psychological growth and development of individuals but also to the promotion of world harmony. It is commonly accepted by those involved with these conferences that any individual’s expanded awareness and insight into intention and motivation, as well as humankind’s expanded awareness, are equally essential to the flourishing of (if not the survival of ) human beings. The 2006 Kyoto Conference on Self and No-Self began with high-minded intentions: We wished to create an environment to enable people from around the globe to become more aware of their intransigent foibles and selflimiting ways. We hoped to influence people to incorporate greater tools for
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self-awareness and improvement into their ordinary daily lives. So we met in the service of these purposes: to keep this exciting exchange of ideas alive, to help transform people’s hearts and minds, to, perhaps, change the world. And, we met because it was fun. Many of the 2006 participants were active in the 1999 conference – as presenters, attendees, or discussants. Both experiences have proved so intellectually and emotionally rewarding that at least half of the participants implored us to conduct a repeat performance. They also want to keep the conversation alive, to deepen relationships with intercontinental colleagues, and perhaps find new like-minded friends: hence this book, distilling some of the material we discussed. For us, the desire for a profound level of engagement stems primarily from the good feelings associated with fulfiling relationships begun with Japanese, European, and American colleagues. We hope in our words you too can meet us. Although Buddhism is by far the older tradition, the Japanese Buddhist monks and scholars warmly greeted this exchange of ideas with practitioners and professionals from abroad. They were deeply generous and enthusiastic in welcoming us to their country and, even more important, they calmly and steadfastly helped to set the stage for this extraordinary exchange. We thank them for their clarity with boundaries, their inquiring attention, and generosity of Spirit. Through the exchange of papers and ensuing discussions, it became apparent that members of both traditions were not only talking about the meaning of the good life, the psychologically healthy life, the awake life, but were also passionately committed to practices promoting it. Many presentations by members from each tradition included the discussion of practical methods and techniques for arriving at and living the good life, the awake life, even as they passionately spoke of strategies for reducing human suffering – individually and globally.
Breakdown of chapters The chapters in this book have been written at a level that should engage equally both beginners and seasoned practitioners and scholars from either discipline. Communicating these essential ideas is our primary objective, and we hope to create an atmosphere that invites newcomers. We ask you, in turn, to join us in this continuing discussion and contribute to this exchange of ideas. The chapters in this volume are organized according to similarity of topics. The book begins with introductory chapters reflecting the interface of the two disciplines and offering thoughts about their shared history (Ando and Gunn). From there we include three chapters under the heading of Buddhist Theory and Practice (Magid, Yasunaga, and Pawle), then two chapters comprising a part called Bridges (Austin and Perelman); one looks at the
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neuroanatomy of meditation (an internal bridge), the other at the parallels between spiritual teachers and psychotherapists (an external bridge). From there, we move to a part about Psychotherapy Theory – replete with Buddhist implications and clinical vignettes (Miller, Young-Eisendrath, and Tift). Then, a set of chapters dealing more exclusively with Psychotherapy Practice (van Zyl, Mathers, Mace, and Wallace). The volume concludes with two fascinating parts addressing the more ineffable, if not numinous, dimensions of the work. One part is entitled Mysticism and Spirituality (Shimizu, Kron, and Muramoto); then, a group of chapters on Myth and Fairy Tale (Nakamura, Hart, and Grant); and, for a finale, in a part called Re-introduction, a poetic meditation on the feeling of both Zen and therapy (Cooper). We hope you, the reader, enjoy a thought-provoking journey through these exciting and challenging chapters. Please take notes and contact the authors with your comments and questions. We sincerely wish to keep the dialogue alive.
References Alexander, F. (1931) ‘Buddhistic training as an artificial catatonia: The biological meaning of psychological occurrences,’ The Psychoanalytic Review, 18, 132–145. Do¯ gen, E. (1985) Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Do¯ gen, ed. K. Tanahashi, San Francisco, CA: North Point Press. Fromm, E. (1960) ‘Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism,’ in D. T. Suzuki, E. Fromm and R. De Martino (eds) Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, New York: Harper & Row. Horney, K. (1952/1987) Final Lectures, ed. D. Ingram, New York: Norton. Meckel, D. J. and Moore, R. L. (eds) (1992) Self and Liberation: The Jung/Buddhism Dialogue, pp. 37–51, New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Muramoto, S. (1998) ‘The Jung–Hisamatsu conversation: A translation from Aniela Jaffe’s original German protocol,’ pp. 37–51 in A. Molino (ed.) The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, New York: North Point Press. Suzuki, D. T., Fromm, E. and Martino, R. De (1960) Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, New York: Harper & Row. Thompson, M. G. (1924) ‘Psychology in primitive Buddhism,’ The Psychoanalytic Review, 11, 38–47. Young-Eisendrath, P. and Muramoto, S. (eds) (2002) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, New York: Brunner-Routledge.
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Ch 2 Psychotherapy and Buddhism A psychological consideration of key points of contact Osamu Ando
Introduction
The great interest in Buddhism in the West today is a highly significant indication of the directions in which modern societies are moving. The role of psychology in this overall movement is steadily gaining in importance (Ando 2003). Today, in the West, it is no longer unusual to see psychiatrists and clinical psychologists who are deeply interested in Buddhism and who have themselves taken up meditation and other forms of Buddhist practice. This is by no means due solely to the personal interests of these professionals, but is strongly related to the relevance such practice has to their work. I personally find it a thought-provoking development that clinical practice should give rise to a desire among psychotherapists to deepen their connections with Buddhism and explore its possible contributions to their field. This chapter considers several issues emerging from the contact between these two traditions, in the hope of providing a foothold for a deeper understanding of Buddhism from a modern perspective.
Questions about ‘ego’ and ‘I’ Western psychotherapy emphasizes the strengthening of the ego, which controls and integrates mental functions. As succinctly summarized in Freud’s (1932: 80) dictum, “Where id was, there shall ego be,” a psychoanalytical approach attempts to foster a strong ego, to increase its rational supervision of irrational, unconscious emotions and actions, to make it more independent of the super-ego, and to widen its field of vision. In contrast, Buddhism maintains a fundamental standpoint of Anatman (no-self ), and regards the ego as an illusion without any substantive reality – something that is, ultimately, unnecessary. I would like to explore this apparently basic difference in outlook between psychotherapy and Buddhism, for this difference is the central problem at the heart of any dialogue between the two traditions. It concerns not only the important question of psychotherapy’s goals, but also what is arguably the
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most important question of all for us: What is the purpose of our lives as human beings? To begin with, what exactly does the term ‘ego’ refer to? It seems that even Western psychology, which one would expect to be the most likely source for an answer to this basic question, cannot provide a clear, concise definition of what the ego is. Despite the fact that the ‘ego’ of psychoanalysis is a longestablished term in the psychological lexicon, it is generally not distinguished in any precise way from the term ‘self.’ Ordinarily, the word ‘ego’ refers to the largely conscious source of mental activity, while ‘self ’ refers to that which is reflexively aware when mental activity is observed in an objective way. These usages are far from standardized, however, and the fact remains that the terms ‘ego’ and ‘self ’ are used in both psychology and philosophy in an ambiguous fashion. However, it can at least be stated that both ‘ego’ and ‘self ’ serve as referential concepts to help define the self-evident, everyday experience of ‘I am,’ or, more simply, ‘I.’ Regardless of what exactly ‘ego’ and ‘self ’ may refer to, every one of us clearly ‘knows’ the experience of ‘I am.’ Try to explain this, however, and one finds the task unexpectedly difficult, most probably because ‘I’ as subject easily shifts to ‘I’ as object and back again.
‘I’ as ‘idea’ I do not intend to go too deeply into the difficult philosophical question of the nature of self, but would like at least to clarify a few necessary points for our discussion. First, the words ‘ego’ and ‘self ’ express concepts or ideas. Second, the experience of ‘I,’ the instant it is consciously grasped, expresses itself in the form of thought. William James (1842–1910), the founder of American psychology, ended ‘The Self,’ the twelfth chapter in his Psychology: Briefer Course, with the following words: To sum up this long chapter – The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as ‘I’ can remember those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain ones among them as ‘Me,’ and appropriate to these the rest . . . It is a thought at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place in this description . . . In this book the provisional solution which we have reached must be the final word: the thoughts themselves are the thinkers. (James 1892) If the thoughts themselves are the thinkers, then it could be said the thinkers are the thoughts. Ultimately, thoughts (ego) do not belong to a person but have a type of autonomous existence. According to James, the
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concept of ‘I’ or ‘me’ is a thought that maintains its sense of continuity through a process of appropriating the thought of the previous moment, along with everything that thought identifies as ‘of me’ – the aggregate of memories, possessions, status, and other things we erroneously recognize as ‘ours’ because of a sense of ‘warmth’ (to use James’s expression) that we experience through association with them. If we understand the self in this way, we can discern, I believe, a point of contact with Eastern thought. Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), the great sage of Jñãna Yoga (the yoga of wisdom or knowledge), viewed the self in very much the same way as James, teaching that it is nothing more than a thought or an idea, which he called the ‘I-thought’ (Godman 1985: 47–49). Buddhism too resembles James in defining the self as a temporary, provisional aggregate of the five skandas (form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness), and as thus devoid of any permanent essence. Mahayana Buddhist thought emphasizes this view further by locating the source of all existence in the dynamic emptiness of sunyata. Thus, the Japanese Zen master Do¯ gen writes as follows in the ‘Genjo¯ Ko¯ an’ chapter of the Sho¯ bo¯ genzo¯ : “As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no Buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death” (Do¯ gen 1995: 69–70). The view that the self is nothing but a temporary aggregate with no essential substance underlies the Buddhist doctrine of Anatman, ‘no-self.’ From the Buddhist perspective, the ‘I’ as defined in the famous dictum of René Descartes (1596–1650) – “Cogito, ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am” – the ‘I’ in no way constitutes a fundamental principle, it is simply another way of conceptualizing the self. It is because we mistake such concepts for something substantial and cling to them that we experience suffering. Thus, the inquiry into the nature of the self is ultimately undertaken in order to resolve the problem of suffering. However, when considering the doctrine of Anatman it is important to keep in mind that what the doctrine is denying is the view of Atman or self as something substantial. It is, in other words, refuting the notion of Atman-aseternal soul. It does not deny the presence of the changing, impermanent self that gives us our sense of subjectivity. The self is constituted, not of a substantial essence, but of thought, although we might mistakenly regard it as an essence that ‘exists.’
Zazen and no-self One way Zen practice is traditionally described is ‘the investigation and clarification of the Self.’ This is the very heart of Buddhist meditation. Do¯ gen expresses the matter as follows: To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is not to
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forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. (Do¯ gen 1995: 69–70) Do¯ gen places paramount importance on the “forgetting the self,” identifying it with “confirmation by all things,” which in turn is identified with his central concept of shinjin datsuraku, “casting off body and mind, self and other.” Viewed from the perspective of James’s thought, Do¯ gen’s ‘self ’ may be seen to correspond to the ‘I’ thought that is “each moment different from [the thought] of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own.” “To forget the self ” would constitute a temporary dis-identification from the sense of ‘mine’ that arises in the way described by James. His portrayal of the nature of self is profoundly insightful, fully justifying his claim that “all the experiential facts find their place in this description.” It is, however, no more than what he says – a description of “all the experiential facts.” Do¯ gen goes further, pointing to the actual content of the ‘selfforgotten’ experience in his statement that this experience manifests as “confirmation by all things.” This confirmation, in turn, is known through the experience that Do¯ gen uniquely describes as “casting off body and mind, self and other.” Needless to say, the ‘I’ consciousness does not consist simply of the activity of the thinking mind, but relates also to the movement of the physical senses. Buddhist meditation can be described as a training in the clear and total awareness of all of these factors as, moment to moment, they give rise to the illusion of self. It was from this meditative experience that Do¯ gen’s words “forget the self ” emerged, and therein lies one of the principal differences between the language of Western psychology and that of Buddhism or Zen.
The psychology of self in Buddhism The ultimate goal in Buddhism is to realize that the true nature of self is Anatman, no-self. This does mean, however, that Buddhism regards the self as unimportant. It is, in fact, deeply interested in the various aspects of the self, and has produced a detailed body of analytical literature on the subject. Whereas Western psychology is mainly concerned with the structure of the self, Buddhism tends to direct its attention towards how the self is formed and how it functions. The Buddhist teaching dealing with what corresponds to the Western concept of self is the doctrine of the five skandas (the five aggregates), which dates to the time of early Buddhism. This doctrine, a detailed observation of the workings of self, identifies five physical and mental elements: form
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(ru¯ pa); feeling (vedana); perception or conception (sañjñå); volition (samskara); and consciousness (vijñana) – which are said to unite temporarily to form the individual personality. Every living being lives and acts through the interrelation of the five aggregates, whose workings are influenced by the karma of the individual being. Thus, the individual being is simply a temporary assemblage, and has no essential substance; moreover, Buddhism teaches, the five constituent elements themselves have no substance. We can see from the five skandas’ doctrine that Buddhism possesses a detailed psychology equal to that of the modern West. However, certain aspects of Western psychology are noticeably absent in the Buddhist tradition, particularly in the area of developmental psychology. Given Buddhism’s history and goals, it is understandable why an interest in such areas would not have arisen. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that Western psychology has accumulated a detailed body of knowledge with which nothing in the East can compare.
Buddhism and developmental psychology From the Buddhist point of view, there is much to be gained by supplementing the traditional thought system with discoveries made by Western psychology. Of particular importance is the psychological understanding of how the self emerges into consciousness during the process of personal development. This phenomenon has been explored in particular detail in psychoanalysis. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker (1973), in The Denial of Death, gives a particularly lucid presentation of psychoanalytic thinking on the concept of self. Becker describes the self as something – a sense of ‘someone,’ an ‘I’ identity – constructed through the conditioning attendant on the individual’s attempts to control his or her inner impulses and to adapt to and function in society, all the while repressing the innate human fear of death. Based on the views of Do¯ gen and James, the self can be thought of as an illusion constructed out of necessity. Manifesting in the form of thought, it is mistakenly regarded as the essence of the human mind (consciousness). And yet, as the subjective consciousness, it does undeniably exist. As Becker points out, the continuous endeavor to escape death and seek substitutes for it is fundamentally a lie, and as such is guaranteed to cause suffering. Buddhism concurs on this point. Birth, which marks the beginning of the endeavor to escape death, is fundamentally suffering, as are aging, illness, and death. This is the Truth of Suffering, the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. This grim fact about the human condition does not cause Buddhism to conclude that our efforts are meaningless, however. Rather, Buddhism gives hope with regard to what lies ahead. If one can grasp the true nature of suffering (the Truth of the Origin of Suffering) and live in the correct manner (the Truth of the Way Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: the Eightfold Path), then it is possible to depart from substitute ways of living (that is, the attempt
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to make oneself real by identifying with things in the objective world). In this way, Buddhism teaches, suffering ceases (the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering).
Self-realization and self-transcendence As mentioned already, the terms ‘ego’ and ‘self ’ are frequently used interchangeably. However, the word ‘self ’ in concepts like ‘true self,’ ‘real self,’ and ‘self-realization’ clearly indicates something quite different from ‘ego.’ What does ‘self ’ in this sense refer to? The concept of ‘self-realization’ has gained wide acceptance in Western psychological circles since the publication of Karen Horney’s (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth, and self-realization is now generally regarded as the end goal that modern people should strive for in their psychological growth. According to Horney, there is a “central inner force common to all human beings and yet unique in each, which is the deep source of growth.” This force, which Horney calls the “real self,” enables a person “in time . . . to find his set of values and his aims in life. In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization” (Horney 1992: 17, original emphasis).
The self in Western psychology The word ‘self ’ in the sense we are using it here – the ‘self ’ of concepts like ‘real self ’ and ‘self-realization’ – does not refer to either the subjective or objective aspects of the ‘I’ of which we spoke earlier. Rather, in Horney’s words, it denotes the “unique” “central inner force” latent within this ‘I.’ Thus, self in this sense does not partake of thought, nor is it an object consciously cognizable by the ego. It must be emphasized that self in this sense, though it can be metaphorically described as a form of energy, is not regarded as something that can be directly known by the conscious mind. Another Western psychologist famous for his distinctive thought on the nature of the self is Carl Jung (1875–1961). Jung used the word ‘individuation’ – a term distinctive to his psychology – in a way roughly synonymous with Horney’s ‘self-realization.’ Jung takes matters a step further by saying that in individuation we ‘become ourselves.’ In this process of ‘becoming oneself,’ the overall center of the personality shifts from the ego (the seat of consciousness) toward a state of integration with the self (which in Jung’s system is the seat of the entire psyche, containing all conscious and unconscious elements, including the self ). Thus, for Jung too the self is not something consciously available to the individual, but can only be known through the mediation of the symbolic forces that Jung refers to as Archetypes. This unknowability is the main point I would like to emphasize here for our discussion.
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The self in Buddhism Let us now take a look at how the self is viewed in Buddhism and the psychology of the East. The following verse is found in the Dhammapada, one of the primary Buddhist sutras: The self is the master of the self. Who else could that master be? When the self is well-regulated, one finds a rare master indeed. (verse 160) Buddhist commentaries on the Dhammapada generally identify the ‘self ’ referred to here as the ‘true self,’ ‘original self,’ or ‘ideal self.’ Buddhism distinguishes two usages of the term Atman, ‘self ’: Atman as the self that has attachment (that is, the Atman that is negated in the doctrine of Anatman), and Atman as the self that is free of attachment (the ‘true self ’ or ‘original self ’). If the self referred to in the verse above is, like Jung’s individuating self, the self whose goal is the attainment of full self-realization, then in that sense Eastern psychological thought and Western psychological thought can be said to have the same objective. In regard to this, the psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980) writes as follows: What is the basic aim of Zen? To put it in Suzuki’s words: ‘Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. . . . We can say that Zen liberates all the energies properly and naturally stored in each of us, which are in ordinary circumstances cramped and distorted so that they find no adequate channel for activity. . . . It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another’. We find in this definition a number of essential aspects of Zen which I should like to emphasize: Zen is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being; it is a way from bondage to freedom; it liberates our natural energies; it prevents us from going crazy or being crippled; and it impels us to express our faculty for happiness and love. (Suzuki et al. 1960: 114–115, original emphasis) In the words of D. T. Suzuki, it is easy to find much in common with the thought of Horney and Jung. The aim of Zen is to see into the nature of one’s being, to contact the inner workings of the self. As Fromm points out later in this essay, these goals are very much the goals of psychoanalysis, and they correspond to the objectives of Jung’s process of individuation and Horney’s process of self-realization. There is, however, an important difference, which must not be overlooked. For Buddhism, the self is not something
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closed to the individual, but is something clearly knowable by the conscious mind. Zen, as D. T. Suzuki describes it, is the art of seeing into and making conscious the very nature of one’s being. Fromm may be correct in saying the methods of Zen and psychoanalysis are different but that their goal is the same. One must keep in mind, however, that once that goal is reached the consciousness achieved by the respective approaches is quite dissimilar. In the famous words of the Chinese Zen Master Linji (d. 866), “On your lump of red flesh is a true man without rank who is always going in and out of the face of every one of you. Those who have not yet proved him, look, look!” Linji’s statement is a strong assertion that the “true man without rank,” the true self, is a reality which can be directly experienced. Whether one calls it Buddha-nature, God, or any of a number of other names, this reality is regarded in Zen as something that can be actually known through practice. Buddhist doctrine and Eastern psychology are based on the recognition of this true self and of the possibility of its immediate experience.
Identification and attachment This strong emphasis on practice and realization in Buddhism may account for the fact that it has nothing comparable to the Western field of developmental psychology. As the focus of spiritual praxis is always on the present, it is understandable that a practice-oriented tradition like Buddhism would have little interest in going back to explore the problems of childhood. Nevertheless, I feel Buddhism would find much that is useful in modern developmental psychology. I would like to consider what might emerge from a comparison between the Western psychological concept of identification – one of the primary forces in the developmental process – and the Buddhist concept of attachment. Identification, a term that has been part of the Western psychological lexicon since the time of Freud, refers to an unconscious mechanism by which, during the development of the ego, the ego attributes to itself the characteristics of an outside entity. Identification is extremely significant when considering the psychological growth and development of an individual. In Buddhism there is no concept corresponding exactly to identification, but the concept of attachment is in many ways similar. Attachment is an idea that is every bit as important to the thought system of Buddhism as identification is to the thought system of Western psychology, so it might be useful to begin the discussion by comparing the two.
A psychological interpretation of attachment The nature of attachment is considered in detail in the Buddhist doctrine of the Twelve-Linked Chain of Dependent Arising, which sees attachment as
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the result of the mind’s attraction to and capture by the mental forces arising from the klesha (defilements), centering on the three root klesha (known as the ‘three poisons’): craving, aversion, and delusion. Attachment, in turn, becomes the impetus for deluded action. How are the klesha and their results understood in Western psychology? It is an unavoidable part of being human to feel affection and desire for that which is pleasant, and aversion for that which is unpleasant. Words like desire and passion have a negative connotation in Buddhism, but as long as a person possesses this human body and mind it is only natural for such psychological proclivities to exist. Viewed from the standpoint of Ernest Becker’s thought, such tendencies can be seen as the workings of the identification process – the attempt to find an identity – through the illusionary belief that by ignoring the fact of our innate helplessness (that is, by avoiding our fear of death) we can somehow assume control of our own life and death. Thus, from the point of view of Western psychology, both attachment and identification are identical in that both constitute ways to escape the fear of death. If a distinction had to be drawn, it would be that the word ‘identification’ emphasizes the active, positive side of the ego’s attempt to avoid death – the side of taking in, of identifying with the world and the objects in it – whereas ‘attachment’ emphasizes the passive, negative side of the same attempt – the side of being bound or tempted by the world and the objects in it. (These two forces of active and passive may, indeed, lie at the root of many of the differences between the cultures of the West and the East.) However, the psychological processes of attachment and identification, both of which operate at the unconscious level, are again similar at the therapeutic level in that both are treated by being brought into consciousness. (In the case of identification, this is called ‘dis-identification’.) Attachment and identification continue ceaselessly throughout the course of a person’s life. If we can say that the consciousness of ‘I am’ arises through the moment-to-moment process of identification, we can equally say that it arises through the moment-to-moment process of attachment.
Liberation from identification In the process of development one can discern various stages through which the child progresses. Children first relinquish their initial identification with the physical environment to identify with their own bodies. Later, with the development of language, the child gradually comes to identify with the ego (that is, with thought processes which constitute the ego; Wilber 1980). Thus, it could be said that the life of the average adult is shaped primarily through identification with thought. Zazen, vipassana, and the other representative Buddhist meditative techniques are directed mainly at this deep identification, and can be regarded as forms of therapy to hasten the individual’s liberation from it. The principal aim of meditation is to remain clearly aware
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of everything which arises in the mind at the moment it arises; through this awareness the usual attachment to (identification with) thought does not take place, and one observes the natural shift in awareness from one object of consciousness to the next. This type of process can be seen as one of dis-identification, in which our usual identifications and attachments are weakened and dissolved. This is a wonderful method of healing that gives one a new viewpoint from which to understand, in a more comprehensive way, the identifications one made with the ‘old self ’ and with various psychological biases.
The ‘therapy’ of ‘salvation’ Any comparison of psychotherapy and Buddhism must take into account the qualitative differences in their fundamental goals: ‘treatment’ in psychotherapy versus ‘salvation’ in Buddhism. Though I have left this question until last, it is an important one, so I would like to conclude this chapter with a consideration, from a psychiatrist’s perspective, of some of the issues involved. The average client who goes to a psychiatrist is seeking treatment, not salvation. Nevertheless, the problems modern people seek help for may be different in nature from those of people at the time of Freud. Eric Fromm had already pointed this out as early as 1960, at the time of the publication of Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. The patients who came to Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century were suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders and other psychopathological conditions, and so their treatment – psychoanalysis – was directed toward alleviating their symptoms and enabling them to function normally in everyday society. Now, however, such patients are in the minority. The patients that psychiatrists are seeing more of nowadays have anxiety disorders related to modern life, depression rooted in existential uncertainty about life’s meaning, and similar complaints. Such patients seek treatment in the hope that it will cure such symptoms as depression, insomnia, marital stress, and boredom with their jobs. Most such patients fail to realize the real problem lies elsewhere. Eric Fromm identified the true source of the patients’ suffering as an underlying alienation from self, from other people, and from nature. The patients’ symptoms, Fromm said, were simply the conscious expressions of an intuition that their lives, though lived in the midst of affluence, were devoid of true joy and meaning. Though symptoms may vary, Fromm’s assessment of the basic problem is one most contemporary psychotherapists would likely agree with. I personally have a very clear sense from my own clinical practice that patients of this type are increasing, especially in recent years. Fromm identified this condition as ‘the illness of the century.’ Sufferers from this malady of our age require something quite different of psychotherapy than did the mentally ill of earlier times.
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What is needed is not treatment aimed at symptomatic relief. For people suffering from alienation, healing is less a matter of eliminating disease than it is of helping the patient attain a state of maximum well-being. It was undoubtedly with this in mind that the psychoanalyst Fromm sought contact with Zen Buddhism. In our work today as therapists we are seeing more and more of an overlap between our field and what was once considered the province of religion, even as many of the established religions find themselves increasingly unable to answer people’s spiritual needs. The growing crossfertilization between psychotherapy and Buddhism has provided many new resources and perspectives for a more positive approach to the treatment of today’s mental suffering. The awareness and equanimity of Buddhist meditation enables people to step back from their own attachments to their symptoms, thus breaking their identification with them. Buddhism, with its ultimate goal of salvation through the attainment of anjin (true peace of mind), can augment the practice of psychotherapy by shifting the emphasis from the elimination of symptoms to the realization of inner well-being. Buddhism, as does psychotherapy today, aims first at this anjin rather than the elimination of symptoms, and acquiring the ‘step-back’ view from identification (attachment) to symptoms through this process. This is an issue not only for psychologists and psychotherapists, but also for everyone in the world who is sincerely interested in liberation from the spiritual malaise of our times. We are moving beyond such categories as ‘treatment’ and ‘salvation’ to address the most important problems of humanity.
References Ando, O. (2003) Buddhism as Psychotherapy [in Japanese], Kyoto: Houzoukan. Becker, E. (1973) The Denial of Death, New York: The Free Press. Do¯ gen (1995) Moon in a Dewdrop, ed. K. Tanahashi, San Francisco, CA: North Point Press. Freud, S. (1932) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, trans. and ed. J. Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1965, p. 89. Godman, D. (1985) (ed) Be As You Are: The Teaching of Sri Ramana Maharshi, London: Arkana. Horney, K. (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. James, W. (1892) Psychology: Briefer Course, New York: H. Holt and Company. Suzuki, D. T., Fromm, E. and Martino, R. De (1960) Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, New York: Harper & Row. Wilber, K. (1980) The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development, Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House.
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Ch 3 Two arrows meeting in mid-air Robert Jingen Gunn
Introduction How well I recall the evening in dokusan (a private interview with a teacher in Zen) when my first Zen teacher told me that psychology and Buddhism are ever at odds, because psychology is concerned with creating a self and Buddhism is concerned with getting rid of the self and attaining no-self. His statement was upsetting to me at the time, not just because I was a practicing psychotherapist and a practicing Buddhist, but also because I had an intuitive sense that the issues were not as simple as ‘self versus no-self.’ As a person devoted both to healing people who come to me in my therapy practice and to seeking spiritual growth in my own life, I believed these two powerful practices, both so essential to me, had to have a common source and a common goal. My Zen teacher’s statement, that psychology and Buddhism were at odds, became a challenge for me. It became my own personal and professional koan: What is the relationship between the self of psychology and the no-self of Buddhism? I feel tremendously warmed and grateful to be in the company of so many people who have also picked up this koan and made it their own. It is not often that one finds companions on a journey which appears to so many people to be esoteric and irrelevant. We are here, of course, out of our belief in the utterly profound and significant import these issues carry for the individuals, societies, religions, and cultures we serve.
Self/no-self: a contradiction in terms? Over the years I was gradually able to discern a common source and common goal shared by Buddhism and psychotherapy. Quite simply, the common source is the experience of suffering and the common goal is to put an end to it. Buddhism and psychotherapy both seek to overcome a sense of alienation and to recover an original vitality that has got lost or has been buried under social conditioning and nonfacilitating environments. While other disciplines may also aim to alleviate suffering, Buddhism and
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psychotherapy are agreed on the direction they take in order to accomplish that goal. The much-quoted words of Do¯ gen Zen-ji, founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism in the thirteenth century, put it succinctly: “To follow the Buddha way is to follow the self.” That is precisely what psychotherapy and Buddhism aim to do: ‘to follow the self.’ We look within the self for the cause as well as the cure of our suffering and the suffering of others. We have all made a countercultural move within our respective cultures. We have ‘taken the backward step,’ as we say in Zen, to look within rather than to continue operating on prevailing social and cultural values/perspectives; we call into question ordinary assumptions about everyday reality. This way of looking at the problem of suffering is not very popular – at least in the United States. It is easier somehow to look for the cause of our pain and misery outside ourselves, to find other people or circumstances as the cause, to try to escape the direct experience of the pain by any of the many routes of drugs, work, or entertainment, or to lapse into a victim mentality. ‘Taking the backward step’ by looking within and facing oneself directly is not only more difficult but is more potentially dangerous. The potential danger lies in the possibility that to look directly at the source of our suffering may require us to re-evaluate our role in relation to significant others, to society, and our culture. If we decide to change our familiar role, others’ lives and expectations of us may be shaken, and relationships may be disrupted. To follow the self, as Do¯ gen suggests, does not, however, resolve the problem presented by my teacher. In English, ‘self ’ is the antithesis of ‘no-self,’ just as ‘A’ is the opposite of ‘not-A.’ Taken at that level, the logic is irrefutable that Buddhism, which espouses ‘no-self,’ is opposed to psychology, which espouses ‘self.’ But when we look into the meaning of the words translated as ‘self,’ we see that there are different concerns and different dynamics involved in how the two are used. As my friend, Paul Cooper, said, When Buddhists say: ‘We do not exist’ or that ‘there is no self,’ this means that there is no ultimate, independent, eternal, permanent self or essence. In other words, there is no self that can be experienced and identified separately from the many interacting factors such as our body, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and relations with others. (Cooper 2005: 23) Is the self that psychology wants to heal and enable to be fully functioning in opposition to the Buddhist no-self ? Clearly, no. The self that psychotherapy aims to heal and strengthen consists of several interacting parts of a person’s psyche. To have a well-functioning self requires awareness, consciousness of choice, the capacity to take risks, to agree or disagree with others, and to imagine things that are not and that might be, however illogical or forbidden. What we aim for is not a permanent,
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unchanging self, but a ‘cohesive’ self that is in fact able to change, to adapt to changing conditions appropriately with an internal consistency. When Shakyamuni Buddha declared the Four Noble Truths, his concern was with the human tendency to reify not only oneself, but also all things into a state of fixedness or solidity that escapes impermanence, old age, suffering, and death. By no-self, he did not mean there is no person there, but only that whatever/whoever is there is subject to such constant change that there is no fixed self. Even more important, there is no separate self exempt from cause and effect, from change and death.
The interworking and interweaving of self/no-self What then, is important about the relationship between psychotherapy and Buddhism, between the self of psychotherapy and the no-self of Buddhism? In the West, ever since the work of Sigmund Freud, the role of the mind in creating perception and reality by means of transference and projection has become increasingly clear. While Freud’s critique of religion is hardly adequate to contemporary psychological thought, his basic premise that the mind tends to create what it needs and to project it onto religious forms is important to consider – even in the case of a nontheist religion such as Buddhism. To fail to examine the ways in which the mind or the unconscious shapes the form, the content, and the process of a religion is as irresponsible as discarding developments of modern medicine out of hand, and can cause unnecessary suffering. However, of all the world religions, Buddhism may well be seen as a leader in recognizing the power of the mind. It has been stressing the importance of the mind for 2500 years, and goes so far as to declare “mind is Buddha” (Shibayama 1974: Case No. 30, emphasis added). So what we have, since Freud, is a Western psychology looking at the role of the mind or psyche in religion and life, and an Eastern religion, Buddhism, also devoted to examining the role of the mind in the formation of consciousness both in itself as a religion and in life more generally. Far from Buddhism and psychology being at odds, they are, at their roots, intrinsically related and mutually beneficial. Insofar as Buddhism is grounded in the absolute basis of reality and psychotherapy is focused on the realm of the relative, they fit together and work together “like the foot before and the foot behind in walking,” as the Sutra on the Identity of Relative and Absolute puts it. Buddhism and psychology need each other the better to fulfill their respective functions of transforming consciousness and self-realization.
Two case studies I would like to illustrate some ways in which this can happen with two clinical examples. Linda came to me for psychotherapy because she was so moved by
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reading my book (Gunn 2000) that she felt hope. She had had several lengthy terms of psychotherapy before at different periods of her life, each of which had proved helpful to some degree, but never fully resolved her chronic experience of anxiety and depression. Those experiences in therapy had taught her, however, to trust her psyche and when she began having panic attacks and deep depression, she wanted someone who would help her work through her conflicts to a deeper resolution. What had impressed her about my book was the trait I identified in the life of Do¯ gen Zen-ji, Thomas Merton, and Carl Jung of persistently going into their experiences of emptiness to the point of a breakthrough. She wanted a therapist who would help her persist similarly to a more complete resolution. Over time, Linda used zazen to manage her panic and anxiety states in between therapy sessions. From her experience in a previous analysis and her training as a dancer, Linda used the shikantaza method of Zen meditation to monitor her bodily sensations, her thoughts and images. Shikantaza, with its instruction to be aware of shifting thoughts and images without attaching to any of them, parallels the function of the analyst’s ‘evenly hovering attention’ taught by Freud. With the positive transference to me as her analyst, she found she could sustain this empathic stance toward herself through zazen in between our sessions, and thus mitigate the anxiety that would otherwise have led to splitting and dissociation. Using zazen in this way, she gained strength and confidence in her ability to manage her anxiety and stave off panic attacks. Zazen functioned, therefore, as an extension of our analytic sessions, and as a bridge between them. Interestingly, she tried becoming a formal student of a Zen teacher, but could not sustain her relationship with him. The teacher insisted she relate to his categories of Zen training and understanding rather than empathically validating her own highly effective method of sitting with her subjective experience. Additionally, Linda had had what she considered a profound spiritual experience several years before her coming to me for therapy. That experience was marked by what she described as a ‘penetrating light’ in which she felt a wholeness and a connection to God. This experience remained a source of comfort, faith, and hope for her, and she wanted to deepen her understanding of what it meant in Zen practice. Unfortunately, her Zen teacher at the time treated it in a rather offhand, cavalier manner as an example of ‘makyo,’ the side effect of a deep experience, but nothing to be pursued in its own right. His inability to affirm the significance of this experience for Linda left her feeling ‘dropped’ precisely when she needed to be held. As a result, bonding and mutual trust did not develop between them. She nevertheless was committed to and continued to practice zazen and to use a Zen perspective in her work with me in helpful ways. It was an essential part of the treatment process that she be allowed to use a method she herself had devised, her own creative integration of zazen and psychoanalysis. Thus, Zen Buddhism and
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the practice of zazen were key elements in facilitating this woman’s psychotherapeutic work by giving her a way to remain directly connected to her own experience. In retrospect, had the Zen teacher had an awareness of some of the psychodynamics involved in personal transformation, he could have been more effective in sustaining a teaching relationship to her. In essence, she left Zen training because of empathic failures. While not every Zen teacher can be an analyst, a basic understanding of the dynamics of transference, projection, and the need for empathy might make teachers more effective. Mary was a young woman whose mother died within a few months of her having become a novice monk. The mother left Mary a substantial inheritance. Trying to be faithful to her vows of poverty, Mary gave the entire inheritance to the Zen center, which the teacher accepted as appropriate conduct according to her vows. The effect of her action on herself, however, was the experience of an overwhelming sense of loss of self as a person, in the psychological sense, because of unresolved identification issues with her mother, and her own untreated and unresolved grief. Lacking the requisite sense of herself psychologically, she fled the Zen center in the middle of the night, never returned and never contacted anyone there again. One cannot help but speculate on the possible alternative outcomes, had the teacher and advisors been trained to anticipate to some degree the precarious psychological state of vulnerability she was in at the time. Amid the trauma of losing her mother, for her to receive more money than she had ever dreamed of, but then, to be required to relinquish it before she ever had time to experience having it, constituted a gross disregard of the tumult she felt inside. In the absence of such understanding, that inner tumult was overwhelming. Had the teacher understood what was at stake for her, space and time might have been made for a process of discernment and a working through of her experience. Whether she remained a monk or not, she might have avoided the extremity of panic and the abrupt severing of ties with her teacher and sangha, resulting in a great deal of unfinished psychological and spiritual business. With some awareness of psychology, the Zen teacher and the center itself might have served as a successful container for her in such an extremely important time of transition, coming to terms with the loss of her mother, as well as understanding its impact on her own identity and sense of self. The first case presented demonstrates the potential value of a spiritual practice for depth psychological work, and both cases demonstrate the potential value of a psychoanalytically informed empathy in spiritual training. Buddhist practice can be a crucial complement to the individual focus of psychotherapy. When the Buddhist teacher and sangha can appropriately hold people in their process of transformation and development, it can add the dimension of human family as well as the spiritually transcendent dimension, constituting a felicitous coming together of the horizontal (sangha
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community) and the vertical (spiritual depth) that exponentially amplifies and supports people in their spiritual unfolding process. What happens in the psychotherapy consulting room is then not an isolated process, but part of the larger reality, the universe itself. When we look closely at the complex interactions in the relationship between a student and a teacher and between a patient and an analyst, we do not see contradictions between what is needed in one case versus the other. What we see in both relationships is the complexity of dealing with individual people whose process and stories need to be understood and responded to with the finest awareness we can muster. It is not a case of ‘self ’ versus ‘noself ’; it is a question of what is needed at the time. The psychodynamic understanding of empathy can serve as an ‘upaya’ – a ‘skillful means’ – for manifesting compassion in the student/teacher encounter. A spiritual practice can serve as a bridge between the psychotherapeutic experience and everyday life, and it can augment the potentially isolating experience of individual therapy with the community of fellow travelers. They can work together like two arrows meeting in mid-air.
References Cooper, P. (2005) ‘The formless self in Buddhism and psychotherapy,’ in M. B. Weiner, P. Cooper and C. Barbre (eds) Psychotherapy and Religion: Many Paths, One Journey, New York: Jason Aronson. Gunn, R. J. (2000) Journeys into Emptiness: Do ¯ gen, Merton, and Jung and the Quest for Transformation, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Shibayama, Z. (1974) The Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.
Part II
Buddhist theory and practice
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Chapter 4
Desire and the self Reflections on J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man Barry Magid
In the novel Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee (2005), a man named Paul Rayment is hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He is so severely injured that his right leg must be amputated above the knee. Though we are not told his age, he appears to be in his sixties, divorced, and living on his own at the time of his accident. Before his accident, he was “solitary, but only as certain male animals are solitary” (p. 25). We are told he is tall and rangy and that, despite his age, he preserved a certain wiry strength. He was proud of his independence: he cooked for himself, he even baked his own bread. He did not own a car but rode a bicycle or walked. He had been a photographer and owned a valuable collection of vintage prints from his native Australia. The novel follows him through his hospitalization and recovery, a recovery not just from the physical aftermath of his injury but from his despair at the loss of his independence and coming to terms with his sudden physical helplessness. His emotional recovery comes about through the care he receives from Marijana, a Croatian nurse who speaks only rudimentary English, who comes to care for him after he is able to return home. Primarily her job is to care for the stump of his leg, but she also helps him bathe, cleans, and cooks for him. As the story progresses, he realizes he is beginning to fall in love with her, even as he is unsure what that means. Before his accident, Coetzee tells us (pp. 45–46), Paul was: All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction, like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. He imagines his ex-wife and former lovers remembering him as “a nice man to cuddle up to on a chilly evening, the kind of male friend you would rather absent-mindedly go to bed with, then wonder later whether it really happened” (p. 46). His main regret in life is not having a son, who he imagines, now at thirty, “a younger, stronger, better version of himself ” (p. 45).
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His nurse is married and the mother of three children, the oldest a teenage boy who has just gotten a motorcycle and has begun to hang out with a rowdy crowd. She confides her fears in Paul and brings her son around to talk to him and so the boy can see the aftermath of an accident, as a warning to him. Paul warms to the boy, and assures the mother, “I’m sure he’ll be alright” (p. 71). The mother’s smile at these words “speaks pure joy” and it is that smile “lingering in his memory that brings about the longed-for, the long needed change” (p. 72). But what, he asks himself, does he want? It’s not simply about sex, or proving that he’s still a man despite the loss of his leg. An old lover had come to visit him and made clear she still found him desirable. But he thinks “he doesn’t want to become the object of any woman’s sexual charity, however good-natured” (p. 38). That is a kind of dependency he cannot bring himself to tolerate. But Marijana’s smile opens up in him a longing he can neither deny nor quite identify. The situation is absurd. What does he want of the woman? He wants her to smile again, certainly, to smile on him. He wants to win a place in her heart, however tiny. Does he want to become her lover, too? Yes, he does, in a sense, fervently. Her wants to love and cherish her and her children . . . he wants to take care of them, all of them, to protect and to save them. (p. 72) Eventually he offers to pay for the son to attend a private boarding school, which his parents hope will get him away from the bad influences of their town and help him straighten his life out. Marijana initially seems dumbfounded by his offer. “Why?” she repeats, “I don’t understand.” “Surely, you must know . . .,” he whispers, “. . . surely a woman always knows.” “I don’t understand,” she repeats, so finally he says, “I love you. That is all. I love you and want to give you something. Let me” (p. 76). Reluctantly, she accepts his offer. He never attempts to make love to her or in any other way physically express his love. Instead, he thinks, he has become a godfather to her son. “The godfather:” writes Coetzee, the man who stands beside the father at the baptismal font, giving his blessing to the new soul and pledging his lifelong support. As the priest in the ritual plays the part of the Son, the intercessor, and the father is, of course, the Father, so the godfather stands for the Holy Spirit. At least that is how I conceive of it. A figure without substance, ghostly, beyond anger and desire. Marijana, however, merely thanks him for his generosity and asks one more time about his leg. “And you? Leg is OK? No pain?” . . . “The leg is O.K.” he says, “No pain. No pain at all” (p. 92).
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What kind of resolution to the problem of suffering and desire is this? Before we attempt to evaluate Paul’s solution, let’s look at the stages he passed through up to this point. I would say Paul has gone through three moral and psychological phases: prior to his accident, he organized his life around the values of autonomy, agency, rationality, and being immune to the disorganizing effects of passion. Immediately after his accident, when that first system collapsed, he went through a period of despair, which was relieved by his falling in love with his nurse. Now, love is what gives his life meaning. He expresses his love despite all the rational reasons for knowing it to be hopeless, and this precipitates his next crisis when his love is rejected. His third solution is to transmute his passion into compassion, to renounce ever possessing the woman he loves, instead becoming like a godfather to her son. Although this provides a kind of ethical satisfaction and resolution to their conflict, he ends up feeling disembodied and ghostly. In this regard, it is interesting to compare Paul’s rarefied, godfatherly compassion with the everyday compassion Marijana offers through her care taking. Her style is not what we would ordinarily call compassionate; she is brisk, efficient, and cheerful. Paul thinks that rarely has he seen anyone throw herself as fully into her duties as Marijana does. Her manner is contrasted with a previous nurse Paul fired who had been more superficially caring in her manner, but whose style he found artificial and infantilizing. Paul thinks, “Objectively, she is not unattractive,” but there is something about her that is the opposite of flirtatious, she “seems to have the ability to annul sex” (p. 30). Whatever the source of her brand of compassion, it does not evidently arise as Paul’s godfatherly version does as an alternative or compromise with everyday passion. Most significantly, there is nothing unique about her relationship with Paul; she cares for him just as she has cared for her patients in the past and will do so for others in the future. He will become a unique figure in her life only through his offer to help her son, not because his feelings for her are matched in any way by her feelings for him. Her professional compassion is indiscriminate, available equally to all those who come under her care. At the risk of caricature, let me venture to say that the three solutions Paul attempts roughly correspond to the values privileged by the relational model, the self-psychological model, and the Buddhist model of mental health. Relational theories, it seems to me, valorize personal agency, the multiplicity of options and narrative possibilities. The main dread is of being struck in a repetitive pattern and hope is represented by the possibility of something new. Paul, in Coetzee’s story, has literally suffered terrible damage to his body. But how are we to understand the psychological damage that attends his new physical limitation? How much does his former and now failed solution of autonomy and agency influence his current subjective experience of being damaged? Stephen Mitchell (1988) cautioned against psychoanalytic models which reify the metaphor of damage through such concepts as
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“developmental arrests, structural deficits or ego defects,” all of which he said, “suggest actual substantive damage” (p. 269). Such models threaten to eliminate the pivotal role of agency in all psychological experience. Mitchell warns such theories can collude with the patient’s need to obscure the way “the sense of damage is something desired by him, cultivated and protected because it plays a central role in holding together his sense of connectedness to others” (p. 268). Paul’s refusal to be fitted for an artificial leg has something of this flavor about it, as the prosthesis would not serve to restore a lost function so much as be a parody of who he once was. It is as if he would rather be seen as fully crippled than a parody of a whole man. In Mitchell’s sense then, Paul chooses the meaning this damage will have for him. However, because he had so organized his sense of himself around his independence and agency, his response to the loss of agency is one of resignation rather than acceptance. Self psychology emphasizes the healing power of attachment, though it also recognizes the danger of trading stability for freedom and becoming stuck in masochistic compromises (pathological accommodations). It emphasizes our vulnerability to the failure of others to provide the love and empathy we need, but from a relational vantage point underemphasizes the role agency can have in creating self/object experiences for ourselves. From a self psychological perspective, Paul appears to be at the mercy of Marijana’s failure to respond to his love. All his efforts at honestly expressing his feelings or attempts to win her over by helping her son fail to elicit what he feels he most needs. Ultimately, she holds all the cards. Buddhism, like self psychology, emphasizes interdependency. Out of an awareness of this essential connection is said to flow compassion. However, unlike self psychology, Buddhism doesn’t address why, for our healthy development, we ever need to be at the receiving end of compassion or simple human love. Like a relational model, the practical disciplines of meditation emphasize the importance of individual agency and the effort required to achieve realization. Coetzee’s story is a kind of parable about the end of suffering. While I would not presume to label Coetzee a closet Buddhist, Paul’s third position, that of godfatherly compassion, though cast in Christian imagery, is reminiscent of Buddhist ways of thinking about suffering and desire. Buddhism can often sound as if it wants to replace desire with compassion. Certainly, the taking of monastic vows, especially a vow of chastity, in Christianity, as well as Buddhism, can be seen as an attempt to enact this substitution: In the strictest form, all sexual activity is renounced, and prayer or meditation is enlisted in the service of replacing desire with compassion as the prime interpersonal motivation. With the ending of desire, according to the Buddha, comes the end of suffering. One of the simplest summaries of the Buddhist approach to suffering and desire is laid out in what are called the Four Noble Truths. These state
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that: life is suffering, the root cause of suffering is desire, understanding the cause can lead to an end of suffering, and to bring about the end of suffering one must follow an Eightfold Path of practice. Indeed, at the end, Paul’s pain and his despair are gone. The despair was extinguished by the kindling of desire, but that too is extinguished in an act of compassion, one however that has left him “a figure without substance, ghostly, beyond anger and desire.” Coetzee leaves us with the question as to whether we should see this choice as a triumph of the ethical or a failure of nerve. Has Paul found a fulfilling outlet for his love that can bring him genuine joy while causing no harm to his nurse and her family? Or has his old distaste for passion led him to rationalize a renunciation of his desires, and resign himself to the role of benign but disembodied spirit? William James famously thought humankind needed to find a moral equivalent of war. Is compassion the moral equivalent of passion? Certainly a life ruled by passion may be amoral and self-centered. But is the kind of compassion that Paul achieves, though certainly moral, a satisfying emotional equivalent for the passion that he renounces? The loss of a leg certainly counts as suffering, and, from a Buddhist perspective, Paul’s accident exemplifies the unavoidably fragile and contingent nature of human existence. However, the deepest form of Paul’s suffering is not physical, but the despair following from his inability to come to terms with injury. Paul’s autonomy and independence have been irrevocably lost, and a certain sense of himself is lost in the process. Again, from a Buddhist perspective, the desire – or attachment – that is the root cause of this level of suffering is not the desire that he feels for Marijana, but the desire that he will always be a certain type of person and for life to allow him a permanent degree of freedom and autonomy. His relationship with Marijana actually allows him to gradually come to terms with being a mortal, dependent creature, one with needs and long-suppressed regrets and longings. Somewhat paradoxically, his love for Marijana cannot simply be reduced to the sort of attachment that Buddhists claim is the cause of suffering, for it is also an expression of his willingness to re-enter the human realm of impermanence and dependency. Once he has allowed himself to once again become human, the question becomes how to properly handle himself and his feelings. His choice of godfatherly compassion can thus be seen as his attempt at Right Action, one of the components of the Eightfold Path (the others being Right View, Intention, Speech, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration). What is ‘right’ about each element of the Eightfold Path is that it is undertaken without self-centeredness, that is, it functions in accord with Buddha’s realization that the self is empty, or impermanent. So, in evaluating Paul’s action from a Buddhist perspective, we might say the question is whether being godfatherly – acting as he says without anger or desire – is an appropriate manifestation of non-self-centeredness or whether his acceptance of a “ghostly, insubstantial” self is actually a perversion of this ideal.
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The fictional saga of Paul and his nurse contains an uncanny echo of the real life story of Thomas Merton, an author and Trappist monk who also fell in love with a nurse near the end of his life. Merton entered Our Lady of Gethsemane monastery in rural Kentucky in 1941, when he was 27 years old. In 1948, his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was published to great acclaim, becoming one of the best-selling religious memoirs of all time. Merton continued to write not just about religion and spirituality, but also about social justice, peace, and civil rights throughout the rest of his life as a monk. He died in 1968 in Bangkok, Thailand where he was meeting with Buddhist teachers on one of his first trips outside of the monastery. He died by accidentally electrocuting himself touching an electric fan when stepping out of a bathtub. For many years before his final Asian journey, Merton had sought time for solitary meditation within his monastic community, where communal prayer and chanting the daily office were the traditional forms of worship. Merton eventually was granted permission to spend increasing amounts of time alone in a hermitage built for him on a hill overlooking the monastery. Paradoxically, the hermitage also created the opportunity for him to receive an everincreasing number of visitors for private conversation for extended periods out from under the watchful eyes of his conservative Abbot. In 1966, Merton developed serious back problems and was admitted to a hospital in Louisville for surgery. Following the operation, he was cared for during his convalescence by a young student nurse named Margie. Although initially reluctant to be drawn into conversation, he found himself looking forward to her visits more and more. There was something in her attention which opened up a deep yearning in him never before acknowledged, which he scrupulously recorded in his private journals as the relationship developed. He realized, although he could live alone without being lonely or missing the company of male friends, he “did feel a deep emotional need for feminine companionship and affection and the realization that as a monk he ‘must irrevocably live without it ended up tearing me up more than the operation itself ’ ” (Griffin 1983: 78). When Margie was with him, “the room was filled with the light of freedom and joy,” Merton wrote (p. 9), and once he left the hospital his hermitage provided the means for them to communicate privately and occasionally meet in secret over the next two years. For the rest of his life Merton struggled how to understand the relationship of that personal joy to the joy he spent his life seeking in God. Because of his vows of chastity and obedience, the two seemed to be in irreconcilable conflict and yet Merton continued to long for a way to experience both. Over and over again, he came up with rationalizations about how “this human love could be integrated in to his monastic and priestly vocation” (p. 100), only to have all his resolutions melt away when he saw or spoke to her. He desperately wanted to find a way to spiritualize their love, yet human passion and longing refused to be sublimated into a
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disembodied “godfatherly” solution. Unlike Paul in Coetzee’s story, Merton consciously wished that his love could be disembodied and be pure and compassionate. “We are determined that our love must be spiritual and chaste,” Merton wrote in his journal, “but the longing for her is frightful and of course so is the conflict that goes with it” (p. 93). Despite themselves they go “deeper and deeper in love.” At one point, Margie challenged him on a point he made about “detachment.” “He conceded it was nonsense to talk about detachment when you were in love, and made a frank commitment: he was attached to her and moreover this attachment profoundly changed his life” (Griffin 1983: 98). Uniting the spiritual and the erotic in poetry is a tradition that goes back at least to the Song of Songs. Integrating the two in real love is far more problematic as Merton found out. Was there some way that his fictional counterpart Paul could not discover, or Coetzee didn’t allow him to see, that might have integrated his unrequited love with his godfatherly role? Stephen Mitchell’s relational perspective always strove to find just such ways of resolving conflict by finding integration at a higher level of synthesis. It was just such a synthesis of sacred and profane love for which Merton strove, but ended by concluding it was impossible. Within the model of self psychology and Lichtenberg’s motivational systems, there is the generally unstated assumption that we can continue to develop and integrate our values, ambitions, and ideals through life. Our most basic needs are not intrinsically in conflict with each other or with reality, as is the case in the classical model. Kohut’s Tragic Man (1976) may have to come to terms with inevitably falling short of his ideals, but the tragedy of Merton’s story seems more in line with Isaiah Berlin’s insight that some of our most basic values may in fact be incompatible with one another. Isaiah Berlin, the pre-eminent philosopher of value pluralism, noted that three assumptions have typically governed our thinking about the nature of both truth and values. These assumptions are present in both religious and scientific modes of thought: first, all genuine questions, whether empirical questions about science or ethical questions, must have one true answer and one only, the rest being errors; second, there is a dependable path or method to discover this truth, and, when found, the truth must be a unified whole; and, third, all true answers must necessarily be compatible with one another. Berlin says his own unquestioning faith in these assumptions was first shaken by reading Machiavelli, who championed the classic virtues of the Roman Republic, which valued courage, patriotism, and the capacity to seize and wield power. Machiavelli contrasts these qualities with traditional Christian virtues of “humility, acceptance of suffering, unworldliness and the hope of rewards in an afterlife. Machiavelli pointed out that these two moralities were incompatible and that there was no overarching criterion by which we could choose between them” (Berlin 1991: 8).
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Berlin (1991: 8) notes: the idea that this planted in my mind was the realization, which came as something of a shock, that not all the supreme values pursued by mankind now and in the past were necessarily compatible with one another. It undermined my earlier assumption . . . that there could be no conflict between true ends, true answers to the central problems of life. “What became clear was that values can clash . . . Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries, but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs . . .” (p. 12). For me, one of the benefits of an interdisciplinary dialogue is to see how the virtues and failures of each position can be illuminated by another model. In Coetzee’s story I find a reminder that no one model has the whole truth. Not only can no model have the whole truth, but the truths of one model may seem to contradict the truths of another. Rather than insist that truth must be unitary and unified, we may have to acknowledge to ourselves that our truths, both our psychoanalytic truths and our Buddhist or other religious truths, are intrinsically incomplete and in competition with one another. Both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in their own ways, have aspired to be a theory of everything, at least when it comes to the cause, meaning, and relief of suffering. Although in my earlier work (Magid 2002) I have tried to show how Buddhism and psychoanalysis can meaningfully enrich each other, I also believe there may be an irreducible tension between many aspects of their respective systems. Although the circumstances in Paul’s life caused him to pass from one solution to another in a particular order, I do not mean to suggest they represent any developmentally or ethically hierarchical sequence. Rather, they illustrate three different organizing schemas, ones that are potentially equally mature, satisfying, and ethical in their own terms. Each, however, is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of fortune, and none offers a final answer to all the permutations of suffering. Agency, love, and compassion may each be the cornerstone of a good life, but each is based upon a different set of often competing values and organizing principles. As both Paul and Merton found out, desire, in contrast to compassion, is precisely about discrimination, not detachment. Our desires are defined by our wanting this, not that. This is especially the case when we speak of the desires that make up romantic love. As George Bernard Shaw once wrote, romantic “love is the gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.” My old Zen teacher, Charlotte Joko Beck, might have agreed but came to a different conclusion. Once, when she was already in her seventies, she said to me she thought she could live with anybody. At the time I didn’t have the temerity to ask her if that attitude, when she was half her age, equally implied she would sleep with anybody. All this was apropos
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of some discussion about how students needed to practice with their idiosyncratic expectations of their partners and spouses. For her it was an illusion to think one could or should get needs met in relationships. (One of her talks was entitled ‘Relationships Don’t Work.’) The compassionate way to be in a relationship – any relationship – was, for her, simply to love and give to the other without any thought whatsoever of getting anything in return. How often have we seen that scenario played out not as compassion but as masochism? Coetzee’s Paul Rayment, like Merton, spent much of his life choosing detachment over desire. Whether we see that life as a model of simplicity and independence or a life that has been entombed by striving after autonomy, his injury shattered his solution as well as his leg, involuntarily opening him up to an acknowledgment of his own needs and desires. Yet those desires seem to have no realistic outlet; Marijana only sees him as a patient, not a potential lover. What is Paul to do with his newly acknowledged feelings? Is his godfatherly compassion only a sign that he has given up too quickly, slipping back into his old resignation? How differently would we view the story if Paul had taken Marijana into his arms, won her over, and made love to her, allowing her to restore him physically to his manhood? That may be what we traditionally expect to see in the movies, but is it what we really want or expect in our lives? Would we want to choose a love that includes physical passion, but also adultery? Is it just a trick of the novelist that we are presented these alternatives as mutually exclusive or at some level do we always have to choose? How do we view Merton’s affair with Margie? Was it a liberation of an undeveloped, loving side of the monk or a threat to his vows and vocation? Merton saw it as both, but, in the end, chose to remain true to his vows and stay in his hermitage; Margie graduated from nursing school, moved out of state, married a dentist, and by all accounts lived happily ever after. Do we, particularly if we see ourselves as practicing Buddhists, Christians, or on another spiritual path, want to choose a form of compassion which requires us to become disembodied? To be truly compassionate do we have to be beyond both anger and desire? (Can’t I just be beyond anger?) As analyst, I spend the bulk of my professional life as a sort of godfather to patients and students, always finding ways to further their growth without indulging my own anger or desire in the process. What about our own needs to be treated compassionately? Our ethical focus is always on learning to behave compassionately, but how vital is it to our continued well-being to be treated compassionately as well? In response to the unreliability of life in general and lovers and care givers in particular, we often harbor, implicitly or explicitly, a fantasy that some practice or other, whether psychotherapeutic or spiritual, will make us impervious to suffering by relieving us of our needs for others. This imagined transformation, which often goes by the name of enlightenment, promises that our
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need for love or our desires for others, will be replaced by love or compassion towards others. In the Buddhist literature there is little talk of the need to be at the receiving end of compassion, the way the analytic literature emphasizes the need to be loved and understood. I previously attempted to redress this imbalance by discussing the self/ object dimension of Buddhist practice (2002) by including the self/object function of the teacher and group. Integration of the values and ideals associated with practice allows the practitioner to have an ever-expanding range of self/ object experiences. When these are fully integrated, the exercise of our capacity for compassionate functioning perfectly dovetails with the creation of a self/object milieu for ourselves. Virtue is its own reward. The Buddhist version of this would be to say that an enlightened person would always function without effort – his or her compassionate response to whatever happens in life calling forth the appropriate self-affirming values and ideals and then, like the song says, all one has to do is “act naturally.” But what about our need to be desired? How vital to our sense of ourselves is it that we feel we can elicit passion in others? How many of us could be content with loving, and being loved, but not being desired? Buddhism, and other ascetic religious traditions, seem to tell us we can truly be happy with that trade-off, yet, as psychoanalysts, we are rightly suspicious that many people could find satisfaction that way. Merton thought he had pulled it off, but Margie proved him wrong. Buddhism offers us a vision of a life in which nothing is lacking. Desire, on the other hand, always seems to arise from an experience of something missing. Aristophanes, cast as character in Plato’s (1961) Symposium, tells a parable about the nature of love in which the ancestors of humankind have been punished by the gods by being literally cut in half, so we, their descendants, are destined to forever be searching for our missing half. What we call love, Aristophanes says, is the desire and pursuit of lost wholeness. Buddhism and Plato seem to offer very different accounts of the loss of that wholeness and the role of desire in its original disruption and possible repair. Coetzee’s story also begins with a man being severed in two (though not so cleanly or equally as in Aristophanes’s tale). Paul will never be whole again the way he was; indeed, he refuses the illusion of wholeness offered by an artificial limb. It is his lack, his suffering, which opens him up to desire. First and foremost is his lack of his leg. There is also his lack of a son, and this seems to be his main regret regarding the loss of his marriage. The son he never had he imagines as a better, more whole version of himself. Buddhist meditation offers to restore us to another version of wholeness, in which we experience ourselves as lacking nothing and to be part of the whole of life. Lacking nothing, love no longer is pursued in order to provide something missing, but is said to blossom forth as compassion, a expression of identity with the other and the world – an outpouring that leaves us fuller rather than emptier. At least that’s how the ideal is presented.
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However, psychoanalysis, whether of a psychological or a relational or a classical model, tells us that desire will never entirely be subsumed under or replaced by compassion. One side of our nature is capable of indiscriminate love or compassion and it is this possibility or capacity which religious practices of all kinds strive to open up. But desire and discrimination do not disappear. I believe that desire is most likely to erupt in its most sexualized or compulsive forms when all other outlets for simple human expression are blocked off. Perhaps the interpersonal difficulties and scandals into which so many meditation teachers and analysts have fallen is a sign of the unreality or impossibility of sustaining a life beyond anger and desire. Each of us needs to find a way to stay ethically and psychologically grounded within the realm of desire; to be oneself in all one’s idiosyncrasies, likes and dislikes, quirks, and habits. A willingness to simply be embodied with all our desires and habits and not have to constantly strive to enact a rarified, disembodied idealized role may ultimately be the most important lesson we have to offer. Being human, we will always have desires which go unsatisfied and opportunities that must remain unfulfilled. We cannot indefinitely evade this basic fact of suffering either by a self-centered pursuit of gratification or by an escape into a transcendent spiritual world where there is no pain. As in so many things, we must find our own version of a middle way, one embracing both desire and pain; where compassion arises, not from a transmutation of passion, but from a growing awareness of our shared nature as interdependent suffering beings.
References Berlin, I. (1991) The Crooked Timber of Humanity, New York: Knopf. Coetzee, J. M. (2005) Slow Man, London: Secker and Warburg. Griffin, J. H. (1983) Follow the Ecstasy, Forth Worth, TX: Latitudes Press. Kohut, H. (1976) ‘The Tragic Man’, in The Restoration of the Self. New York: IUP. Magid, B. (2002) Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis, Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Merton, T. (1948) The Seven Storey Mountain, New York: Harcourt Brace. Mitchell, S. (1988) Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato The Collected Dialogues (trans.), eds E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chapter 5
On ‘Zen and “Amaeru” ’ A psychological approach to Zen Sodo Yasunaga Roshi
Introduction Dr Takeo Doi’s book Amae no kozo, first published in Japanese in 1971 and translated into English in 1973 as The Anatomy of Dependence, remains a perennial best seller in its field, attracting a wide readership in both Japan and the West. Together with Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) and Chie Nakane’s Japanese Society (1970), it is one of the classics of nihonjinron literature, a genre seeking to define the distinguishing characteristics of the Japanese as a people. Doi, basing his views on experiences as a clinical psychiatrist, observations of Japanese child-raising techniques, and a two-year residence in the United States (1950–1952), argues that a key to understanding Japanese social relations, group dynamics, and behavior patterns lies in the distinctively Japanese form of interpersonal dependence known as amae. Doi, himself a Roman Catholic, is interested in the relationship between amae and the Christian faith. In a book entitled Shinko and ‘Amae,’ he comments: I have written that the relation between amae and faith is a matter of equal importance to the relation between rationality and faith, yet subsequently no one appears to have looked into this problem. The sole exception is Fr. William Johnston, a Jesuit priest and Zen practitioner who was inspired by one of my English articles on amae to write an essay entitled ‘Zen and “Amaeru”.’ (1990: 154–155) The essay by Fr. Johnston to which Doi refers is included as chapter 7 in Johnston’s book The Still Point (1970). Johnston was born in Ireland in 1925 and came to Japan in 1951 to teach at Sophia University in Tokyo. As a Jesuit priest, he has long been involved in interreligious dialogue, particularly that between Christianity and Buddhism, a subject on which he has published numerous books. He is also known for his translation of Shasaku Endo’s novel Silence.
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In addition to its insights on religious faith, Johnston’s essay ‘Zen and “Amaeru” ’ also provides an intriguing analysis of Zen Buddhism itself, as seen with Western (and Jesuit) eyes through the lens of Doi’s concept of amae. Intrigued by Johnston’s perspective, I asked for and readily received his permission to translate his article into Japanese for publication in the journal Zen Bunka (2003). Speaking from the standpoint of one in the traditional Zen world, I found points in Johnston’s article I fully agreed with as well as those I questioned. I would like to address several of the more important of these points in this chapter.
Points of agreement and disagreement The loss of oneself in the totality Zen enlightenment is defined by Johnston as a “loss of oneself in the totality” (Johnston 1970: 121; Zen Bunka 187: 19). With this as a basis, Johnston quotes a passage from Doi and suggests many of those seeking satori might be searching for a relationship similar to that between mother and child. Satori would thus concern a relationship in which the self disappears into the infinite essence of “the universe” or “cosmic consciousness,” instead of into the mother, as with a child. The consequent loss of individual selfhood, Johnston suggests, would be what Zen refers to with terms like muga (no-self, or Anatman in Sanskrit), mushin (no-mind), mu (nothingness, emptiness, or sunyata in Sanskrit), and so on. Intriguing though this thesis is, I wonder if the state Johnston refers to as muga might not be more accurately characterized as, in Japanese, boga (literally, ‘the self forgotten’) or datsuga (literally, ‘the self dropped off or removed’), states more similar to religious ecstasy or rapture than to the ‘no-self ’ of Zen. The mystical traditions often describe the thorough-going death of the ‘small self ’ and rebirth of the ‘true self ’ which occurs in the core mystical experience of ekstasis. That which we experientially identify as ‘self ’ – the small self – disappears through absorption into an infinite essence, an essence in which the sense of ‘otherness,’ or ‘subject–object,’ is lost and the true self finds expression. If we follow Johnston’s mystical interpretation, muga is reduced to an experience of the one-sided extinction of the small or individual self. In its original sense, muga is much broader in meaning, referring to an awareness that affirms there is no metaphysical essence or substance in things and thus recognizes no substantive ‘self ’ or ‘thing’ that might correspond to a permanent self. Even if the small self were to disappear and an infinite essence remain, this could never constitute a true ‘no-self.’ The ‘small self ’ may have disappeared, but its place would have simply been taken by a reborn ‘big self ’ constituted of ‘emptiness’ or ‘infinite essence.’
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Pure consciousness of dependence, or consciousness of pure dependence Later in his essay (Johnston 1970: 125; Zen Bunka 187: 23), Johnston writes that he wonders whether the Zen meditator reaches in satori “a pure consciousness of dependence (or a consciousness of pure dependence) without a knowledge of what is depended upon” – a statement that brings to mind “the feeling of absolute dependence” spoken of by the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Johnston, though foreseeing objections from the side of Zen, goes on to say that “one cannot but wonder if [Zen meditators] are not seeking something upon which it is impossible to put any name except that of God.” The great Chinese Zen Master Linji Yixuan (d. 866 ) stresses the realization of a subjectivity characterized by absolute freedom, saying, There is only the person of the Way who depends upon nothing, here listening to my discourse – it is this person who is the mother of all Buddhas. Therefore Buddhas are born from non dependence. Awaken to non dependence, then neither is there any Buddha to be obtained. Insight such as this is true insight. (in Yoshitaka 1993: 59) Such a statement surely leaves no room for any type of dependence in Zen, including the absolute dependence proposed by Johnston. Nevertheless, even in the Zen tradition, with its standpoint of self-power (in contrast to the otherpower of the Pure Land tradition), there is a perception of a transcendent force, an ‘Other,’ at work at the very source of self-power, inspiring and supporting it. Though we may not call this transcendent force ‘God,’ it may correspond to the “something ultimate” of which Johnston speaks (Johnston 1970: 128). The tendency to recognize a transcendent force is much more pronounced in Japanese Zen than in Chinese Zen, a fact first pointed out by the eminent Buddhist scholar Nakamura Hajime (1912–1999). Nakamura, citing the writings of the Zen Master Do¯ gen Kigen (1200–1253), suggested that liberation in Japanese Zen focuses not so much on satori attained through self-powered practice, but, ultimately, on complete surrender to the Buddha as the personification of the absolute. In the ‘Shoji’ (Birth and death) chapter of the Shobogenxo, Do¯ gen writes: When you let go of both your body and your mind, forget them both, and throw yourself into the house of Buddha, and when functioning begins from the side of Buddha drawing you in to accord with it, then, with no need for any expenditure of either physical or mental effort, you are freed from birth – and – death and become Buddha. (Trans. Waddell and Abe 2002: 106–107)
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How different this is from the words of the eighth-century Chinese master Dazhu Huihai (n.d.), who declared: Know that sentient beings must liberate themselves; the Buddhas cannot do it for you. Strive on, strive on! Practice for yourselves, and do not rely on the power of an outside Buddha. A sutra says, ‘Those who seek the Dharma do not seek it through adherence to the Buddhas.’ (Sojun 1970: 99) Johnston thus shows great insight in identifying the catalytic role played by amae, as one of the fundamental characteristics of Japanese psychology, in transforming the Zen of China into the Zen of Japan, distinguished by its element of belief in other-power. The Christian mystics often speak of God in terms reminiscent of Zen Zen clearly does share many of the central characteristics of mysticism (Johnston 1970: 125; Zen Bunka 187: 23). However, although it is not my intention here to pass judgment on the relative merits of Zen and mysticism, I would like to emphasize that a simplistic identification of Zen with mysticism should be avoided. To my way of thinking, mysticism represents an attempt to realize on the religious plane the desire to return to the womb. The mystic, in other words, appears to be striving for a spiritual rebirth through the experience of unio mystica in the Holy Womb. Zen, however, does not seek its spiritual ground in an experience corresponding to this. Any experience of this sort is nothing more than a transit point; it is, to put it in the strongest terms, nothing more than a necessary evil. Zen teaches that the “ordinary mind is the Way” and sees the expression of ultimate truth in the everyday activities of life. Izutsu Toshihiko, a Zen Master (1914–1993), commented: What is far more important in Zen is not the mystical union of subject and object itself, but the dynamic functioning of the all-encompassing field of consciousness that manifests when subject and object are enwrapped from above, as it were, during the state in Zen which corresponds to mystical union. (Toshihiko 1989: 360) Another point of difference between the two traditions is indicated in Johnston’s words: Perhaps [the Christian mystics], too, attain to a consciousness of pure dependence; and only dark faith gives them the knowledge that what they
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depend upon is the transcendent God who can only be ‘known by unknowing,’ who can be loved but not known. (Johnston 1970: 125) In other words, the driving force behind the Christian mystic’s search for union with God is clearly the love of God. This type of emotive energy, however, is definitely not what drives the Zen practitioner, who is motivated to satori by the more intellectual energy of the Great Doubt. There are, in the final analysis, important differences between Zen and mysticism. Both Zen and Christian mysticism are often called therapeutic Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Christian mysticism is ‘therapeutic,’ let us consider whether Zen can be characterized in this way (Johnston 1970: 128; Zen Bunka 187: 26). The usual images associated with early Chinese Zen are that of reclusiveness, individualism, and even violence of a sort (with its use of the stick and the shout). Japanese Zen, owing to its historical connections with the warrior class, tends to be regarded as a practice-oriented tradition of Buddhism demanding rough, stoic training. In spite of this, Johnston concludes his essay by saying: The experience of the Zen people and the Christian apophatic mystics does seem to offer some solution to the problem of dependence by eliminating reliance on what I have called drugs in favour of dependence on something ultimate. This is not dispensing with dependency wishes altogether but finding the truest meaning of human dependence. Perhaps it is because they do this that both Zen and Christian mysticism are often called therapeutic. If one is seeking a therapeutic aspect in Japanese Zen, its concrete expressions would no doubt be the naikan (introspection) and nanso (‘soft butter’) methods espoused by the master Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768) in his famous work Yasen kanna. Hakuin called into question the traditional attitude of sparing neither health nor life in the search for enlightenment, saying: “Though the seeker may practice and penetrate the Great Matter of the Five Houses and Seven Schools, of what use is this if his life is short?” (Hakuin 1934: 128). Hakuin’s stress is on the importance of a long, healthy life in furthering post-enlightenment practice and advancing the bodhisattva path of “seeking enlightenment above, liberating all sentient beings below.” His teaching of techniques like the soft-butter method are simply upaya (‘the means’) for helping to realize these goals. However, Johnston’s term ‘therapeutic’ refers not to matters of health and praxis, but to the psychological and
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spiritual concept of “the truest meaning of human dependence,” directed toward the inner peace that comes with a complete entrusting. Might not Johnston be indicating to us here the horizon of possibility where religious healing and psychotherapeutical recovery connect with and complement one another?
Conclusion In the discussion above I mentioned fundamental differences between muga and boga, and noted elements in Zen of other-power thought which may be described as a form of dependence. I also pointed out some dissimilarities between Zen and mysticism, then considered the implications of Johnston’s position that it is in the domain of dependence that religious healing is manifested. I would now like to present several of my own ideas on the relationship between religion and psychotherapy. This is not a simple matter. Whereas psychotherapy seems oriented toward the treatment of the patient’s temporal psychological symptoms, religion is concerned with the salvation of the entire person both before death and afterwards. Patients seeking recovery from psychological disorders do not generally occupy themselves with awakening to the love of God or to the true nature of the self. Moreover, there is in the transformative moment when healing and salvation take place something which cannot be logically grasped, a movement of a power that transcends human understanding. Religion, in particular, while recognizing rational, scientific explanations and methods, is more likely to associate itself with the irrational. We might go so far as to say that this dimension of the irrational is what we seek from religion, as opposed to psychotherapy. And I believe that we should not underestimate what this dimension has to offer.
References Benedict, R. (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Rutland, VT: Charles Tuttle. Do¯ gen (2002) The Heart of Do ¯ gen’s Shobogenzo, trans. N. Waddell and M. Abe, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Doi, T. (1973) The Anatomy of Dependence, New York: Kodansha International. Doi, T. (1990) Shinko and ‘Amae’ [Religious faith and amae], Tokyo: Shunjusha. Endo, S. (1969) Silence, trans. W. Johnston, Rutland: Tuttle. Hakuin, E. (1934) Hakuin Osho zenshi [The complete works of Hakuin], vol. 5, p. 128, Tokyo: Ryaginsha. Johnston, W. (1970) The Still Point: Reflections on Zen and Christian Mysticism, New York: Fordham University Press. Nakane, C. (1970) Japanese Society, New York: Pelican. Sojun, H. (1970) Tongo yomon [Essentials of sudden enlightenment], Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo.
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Toshihiko, I. (1989) Kosumosu to anchi kosumosu [Cosmos and anti-cosmos], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Yasunaga, S. (trans.) (2003) Zen Bunka, 187. Yoshitaka, I. (1993) Rinzairoku [The record of Linji], Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko.
Chapter 6
The ego in the psychology of Zen Understanding reports of Japanese Zen Masters on the experience of no-self Reggie Pawle Introduction The aim of this chapter is to facilitate dialogue between Japanese Zen Buddhism and Western psychology. The theme of the Kyoto 2006 conference on Self and No-Self in psychotherapy and Buddhism was chosen to facilitate such a dialogue. This goes right to the heart of what is perhaps the fundamental difference between the mainstream of Western psychology and the tradition of Buddhism. Western psychology has commonly understood mental states as necessarily having a subject and an object. Franz Brentano, for example, asserted that all mental states are of or about something, so each mental state necessarily has a “reference to a content” or “direction toward an object” (Brentano 1973: 88). This is a good description of how mind functions as subject and object. Carl Jung also understood consciousness and mind as basically functioning within subject–object and asserted that this subject was the ego. One of Jung’s main criticisms of Buddhism (and yoga) was what he understood as the goal of eliminating the ego in order to attain no-self. Jung viewed this as impossible. He asserted that if the ego was eliminated, the result was not no-self, but rather only absorption by the unconscious (Clarke 1994: 146–149). However, Buddhism has for centuries insisted that it is precisely subject– object mental states that are the source of mental pathology and that the transcending of these mental states is full psychological healing, or in the terminology of Buddhism, realization and enlightenment. An example of this point in the tradition of Buddhism is found in the writings of Vasubandhu from the Yogacara school. Vasubandhu in his The Thirty Verses begins by defining the problem that is to be addressed as “consciousness divided as subject and object” and then proceeds through the text to address how subject– object consciousness can be transcended (Kochumuttom 1982: 128–134). Thus, while Western psychology has commonly held that mind without ego results in some kind of mental pathology, Buddhism and Zen have held the opposite – that ego consciousness can be transcended and this transcendent consciousness is actually a clearer and more functional consciousness than ego
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consciousness. In Zen terminology this transcendent consciousness without ego is referred to as ‘no-self.’
Gaps between Japanese Zen Buddhism and Western psychology Before exploring ego and no-self further, I think it is important to be aware of some basic differences between Zen and psychology. Having a meaningful dialogue is not an easy endeavor as there are wide discipline, cultural, and experiential gaps. First, Zen Buddhism is a religion and not a psychology. Remembering this is important. Zen does not attempt to explain how mind works in the way that Western psychologies attempts to do. For example, psychological development is never addressed in Zen or in Buddhism as a whole. This is not a limitation of Zen and Buddhism, as some in the West have asserted (Engler 1998: 118), but is rather a result of Zen’s function as a religion. Zen also does not try to work with the range of psychological pathologies that Western psychologies attempt to address. Zen monasteries are not mental hospitals. Because of these and other differences, I think that to say there is a ‘Zen psychology’ is inaccurate. There is a psychology within Zen that is in some ways clearly stated, but in other ways only implicit. Thus, it is more correct to say there is a ‘psychology of Zen.’ Another significant gap between Zen and Western psychology is cultural. Zen is embedded in an East Asian cultural context that is very different from the cultural context within which psychology began and has developed. One result of this is that the use of the same term can have different meanings in the different disciplines. Particularly relevant to this point is the fact that when Zen practitioners speak of ego, they may or may not be speaking of the same thing that Western psychologists speak of when using the same term. A third significant gap between Zen and Western psychology is epistemological. It is commonly asserted in Zen that only a person who has realized the truth of the Buddhist teachings can really understand these teachings. I often have been told this. Thus, the question arises: How is it possible for a ‘nonenlightened’ psychologist to understand ‘enlightened’ Zen experience? While there are many possible responses to this question, including the analysis that it is only social opportunism (Faure 1991: 21–23), my response is that it is particularly relevant to methodological issues. Since there are so many gaps between Zen and Western psychology, I believe to understand the psychology of Zen, it is first necessary to understand mind from the Zen point of view. In cross-cultural psychology this is called an ‘emic methodological approach,’ by which the researcher tries to understand in terms of the local frame of reference. My belief is Zen not understood from the inside is Zen not fully understood. Thus, the methodological approach of this chapter is fundamentally experiential. The basic source
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material for my ideas comes from interviews I did with Japanese Zen priests regarding their experience of no-self and ego (Pawle 2003).
The ‘no’ of no-self Let us begin with the end of Zen training, which is the living of no-self. I have often heard it said that true Zen practice does not begin until realization of one’s true Self occurs. The living of this realization in life, in the midst of daily life, is what Zen really is. The practice a person does which leads to this living is Zen training. And, according to Zen, central to this realization of one’s true self is the realization that one’s Self is actually not a self in the usual understanding of the term. In Zen terminology the true self is a ‘no-self.’ Let us examine some descriptions of no-self. Keido Fukushima Roshi described no-self as ‘the self of mu’ and said that living no-self can be described as “being oneself mu, nothing” (Pawle 2003: 218). Mu is a Japanese syllable which functions as the negating part of the word, as in ‘no-mind,’ mu-shin in Japanese. Fukushima Roshi said he uses the Japanese syllable mu rather than the English word ‘no’ because ‘no’ does not convey the meaning of mu (Pawle 2003: 107). To understand the Zen meaning of mu it is first necessary to understand that mu does not mean literal nothingness or emptiness as many interpret it. It rather means, in the words of Sekkei Harada Roshi, “It’s not that it is a literal void, it’s just that the mind cannot perceive it” (Pawle 2003: 99). In other words, the self of mu is not a self the mind can perceive or describe. Rather, it is empty of such perceptions or descriptions. Edward Conze, a Buddhist scholar, wrote similarly: “The Buddha never taught that the self ‘is not,’ but only that it cannot be apprehended” (Conze 1970: 39). There are two meanings in these statements as to what no-self, or the self of mu, is; one a negation and the other an affirmation. The negation is what the self is not, or, in other words, what one’s actual self is empty of. Zen often speaks in such negative terms. One significance of this is the limits of the human mind, important for psychologists to remember. Every time I pass through the Osaka International Airport I am reminded of this. The drugsniffing dogs there have the perceptual ability to smell drugs inside luggage, but I as a human do not. The affirmative meaning of mu is what the self is. It is something, but what it actually ‘is’ is very hard to say, due to the limits of mind and language. Maybe one could say the self is limitless because it is outside the perceptual abilities of mind. The self of mu combines both these negative and affirmative meanings. Fukushima Roshi described this in the following way: “I think it’s better just to keep it as mu because of the experiential sense, it has both senses, not just nothing” (Pawle 2003: 107). This is the sense of mu that is in the Heart Sutra, one of the basic texts of Zen, which states: “Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form” (Sasaki 1974). This means that, according
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to the psychology of Zen, the Self is both something and at the same time is limitless, thus not being a thing. Thus, the term no-self, the ‘self of mu,’ points to both being and non-being together at the same time. Clearly there is a reluctance on the part of Zen Masters to say clearly what is no-self. However, when pushed, a couple of Zen Masters did describe it in their respective ways. One was Harada Roshi, describing it as ‘mysterious.’ He said, “It is important, there is something and it’s mysterious.” He then admonished me, rather than to try to overanalyze it, to “leave it just being mysterious” (Pawle 2003: 1). A second description was directed at my own notions of no-self as some kind of literal emptiness and really surprised me. Gikan Nakajima Roshi described emptiness as ‘life.’ I asked him, “Are you sure you mean life?” He affirmed that he did and further said, “The Zen sect relies upon life itself, the unthinkable life itself. Zen training is the investigation of how life works within his or her self ” (Pawle 2003: 107). From this description I take a risk in saying that the ‘self of mu,’ or no-self, is the activity of life within a person, or is limitless, or is anything. Fundamentally, the self of a person cannot be known. It is truly ‘mysterious.’
The living of no-self So having understood no-self a little, how do Zen Masters describe the living of no-self ? What does it mean psychologically for mind to function as no-self ? Returning again to Fukushima Roshi, he explained the living of no-self is living freedom of mind in the Zen sense, which is “freedom to, not freedom from” (Pawle 2003: 122). ‘Freedom from’ is the common understanding of freedom as freedom from some kind of oppressive force, which psychologically could be negative environmental influences. ‘Freedom to’ is not freedom from anything, but rather is the psychological ability to be free to function as is needed, as is appropriate, in any situation. In a negative sense, ‘freedom to’ means any of the functions of one’s mind are not bound or limited by another part of mind. A common example in Buddhism of not having ‘freedom to’ is to perceive something from one’s personal point of view and not being able to perceive this thing as-it-is. In this context, no-self is freedom of activity and is not an entity in any way. Another way of living no-self is being emptiness. Harada Roshi described this when talking about how the five senses function as no-self: It’s no different than seeing the morning star or seeing a flower or hearing a sound, where two things that do not have substance melt together. That’s the self or the thing hearing it and the thing that was heard. Both things have no substance. So in that instant those things became one. (Pawle 2003: 214)
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In this activity one’s independent or separate self disappears. No-self in this sense is an ability of mind to function in such a way as to allow for mental states to lose their person-based characteristics and their characteristic of subject perceiving object. Having ‘no substance’ refers to mind being able to function without a fixed sense of self. Subject–object mental states can disappear and a mental state of oneness can arise. This mental state, using Brentano’s words quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is without “reference to a content” or “direction toward an object” (Brentano 1973: 88). This is one psychological understanding of emptiness, a mental state empty of reference points and a direction. This is a potential of mind crucial to the psychology of Zen, for it gives a person the possibility of dropping self-centered orientation, to be truly open psychologically, and to experience from a perspective that is much bigger than a limited personal one. A mental state of oneness of self and environment allows for the flowering of compassion in the Buddhist sense. Nakajima Roshi described the experience of this in the following way: Everything can be seen as me. So when you see the flower, the flower is mine and the flower is me. Therefore we say it’s the great self, the self expanded to the universe. So even though I feel pain, this pain is not originally from my self. I also accept pain from others. So if you’re painful, I can feel your pain. (Pawle 2003: 113–114) From the perspective of the psychology of Zen, this is optimal functioning of mind. Living no-self, rather than negating life or withdrawing from life, is full participation in life. No-self is mind that is flexible – its faculties functioning optimally, not being restricted by the limits of those faculties, able to respond appropriately in each circumstance.
The ego and no-self The common way of talking about the ego in Zen is in negative terms, particularly as something which needs to be eliminated. Jung and much of Western psychology, as mentioned earlier, have viewed eliminating the ego as pathological. So the question arises: Are Zen and psychology talking about the same thing? It should be quickly clear to anyone who talks to a Zen Master who speaks about the living of no-self, that much of what Western psychology commonly attributes to the ego is very much alive in this living. For example, regarding identity, such Zen Masters know who they are! They also are able to coordinate and carry out their actions, so obviously there is a part of their minds that is functioning in some kind of executive way. This kind of functioning of
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mind in Zen is not spoken of as the ego as it is in psychology, but rather is considered to be part of the natural functioning of mind. In Tibetan Buddhism this is referred to as the ‘mere self ’ (Hayward and Varela 2001: 118). In Zen this is a part of what is referred to as ‘everyday mind’, and is part of living no-self. An example of this in Zen literature is case 19 of the Mumonkan, in which one Chinese Zen teacher Nansen (748–835 AD) talks of ordinary mind as the Way of Zen (Huikai 1977: 73). In the psychology of Zen I refer to this as the ‘natural ego.’ In Zen, the ego is spoken of commonly as something that is a hindrance to the living of no-self. Thus, its elimination is viewed as an important step in psychological development. An example is Fukushima Roshi describing living no-self as “a way of living without ego. It’s the experience of having the ego cut off ” (Pawle 2003: 195). Other Zen priests also spoke in similar ways. Nakajima Roshi spoke of ‘killing’ the ego, Kanju Tanaka Roshi spoke of his ego “disappearing,” Sodo Yasunaga Roshi said the “old ego bursts and explodes,” and Sekkei Harada Roshi spoke of the “death of his ego” (Pawle 2003: 206–223). Earlier I quoted Harada Roshi who described the process of becoming one, in which subject and object merge and a mental state of oneness appears. He continued his description regarding becoming one by saying, “If there is a thought that there is a self on this side, it’s not possible for that [oneness] to happen. We think that there is a self here on this side, so this merging does not happen” (Pawle 2003: 214). This self that Harada Roshi refers to here is what Zen usually understands as the ego. The ego in Zen is that which is extra to the natural ego and interferes with the natural functioning of mind. The natural ego is a function of a certain kind of consciousness and is not needed for all types of consciousness. The ego in Zen is that type of consciousness which asserts that it must always be present, thereby preventing mental states that result from the merging of subject and object.
The pivotal role of the ego in mind The psychology of Zen asserts that the ego, with its tendency to interfere in the living of no-self, is the pivotal or crucial function of mind. Fukushima Roshi asserted, “Without getting rid of ego we cannot move on. I mean that’s the basis of it. It’s fundamental” (Pawle 2003: 235). Zen agrees with the assertion of Western psychology that the ego, with functions such as identity and executor, has a central function in mind. Zen additionally asserts that the ego, having this central function, can influence or ‘tilt’ (Guenther 1989: 30) the whole system of mind. Thus, all of the rest of mind is affected by how the ego is functioning. An example is the Buddhist understanding of emotion, which is that emotion has an inherent evaluative quality. Thus, emotions are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, depending on the ego’s evaluation. Another example is perception. Buddhism asserts that people perceive according to
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what the ego judges as important or not important. Thus, rather than perceiving things as-they-are, things are perceived through the lens of the judgment of the ego. An ego that interferes with the living of no-self is functioning pathologically. According to Zen, this happens as people commonly misunderstand their natural ego as an actual being rather than a function, thereby creating the illusion of a separate self. They identify with their egos in an exclusive way, and believe their egos are entities which must be nourished, protected, and at all costs endure over time. They misapprehend their subjectivity as being distinct from what they perceive as objective and miss the interconnection of subject and object. This, Zen asserts, is a cognitive delusion which is the fundamental source of psychological suffering. Harada Roshi said, “It is not desire that is the problem, but the one who is desiring that is the problem” (Pawle 2003: 353). Desire is a part of natural or ordinary mind. The one who is desiring is the ego and this is, according to the psychology of Zen, the source of pathology in mind. From this perspective the ego can be seen as the basis of all problems in the world. The pathology of the ego can be thought of as being of two kinds. One is cognitive, the delusion that the ego is a self, is a substantial entity. This I have just discussed. The second is emotional, which is attachment to the ego. Zen considers attachment to be fundamental to all phenomena. Harada Roshi said that “it would not be a mistake to say that the world is made of conditions and attachment” (Pawle 2003: 146). Yet, if one becomes attached to attachment, and holds onto one’s attachment over time, then natural attachment becomes a different, unhealthy kind of attachment. Conversely, if one detaches from attachment, then one is denying the kind of attachment that is fundamental to being a person in the world. Thus, Zen emphasizes non-attachment, which means being attached fully in the moment without trying to maintain the form of this attachment. Psychologically, this can be expressed as simultaneously taking something very passionately and completely seriously while being fully relaxed. In action, non-attachment means participating fully, but without attachment to the result of this participation. Non-attachment refers to a kind of ‘natural attachment,’ similar to the natural ego. Non-attachment is one way to express the living of no-self. Yasunaga Roshi, using the term ‘no-attach’ rather than my term ‘non-attach,’ described it this way: “Being no-attached is being attached to everything. So if you do not covet anything you covet everything. Attachment continues to exist, but as for the quality it is drastically changed” (Pawle 2003: 182).
The death of the ego Attachments and illusions are the ways in which the ego ‘tilts’ and interferes with the system of mind. This includes the unconscious, which, from a
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Buddhist perspective, consists of attachments and illusions of which a person is unaware. Eliminating these attachments and illusions is the goal of Zen practice. Unconscious attachments are considered particularly difficult to work with, requiring a transcendence of the functions connected to natural ego consciousness. Fukushima Roshi said, “Unless you get to the point in your practice beyond mere discrimination and consciousness, it’s not possible to get through those unconscious attachments” (Pawle 2003: 148). When Zen Masters speak of ‘killing’ the ego, they are referring to eliminating these attachments and illusions, the source of which is the ego. Fukushima Roshi said, “Being oneself mu” is “getting rid of all attachment to ego,” and that this was “cutting off the illusions of the ego” (Pawle 2003: 167). He said that as a result of many years of Zen training “you can really get to that point where all of them [illusions and attachments] are actually cut off. Then there is no more ego to arise” (Pawle 2003: 220). Two Zen priests described their experience of the disappearance or death of the ego. Tanaka Roshi said: So one day when I reflected on myself I recognized that I couldn’t find myself. My small ego was disappearing completely. That was a kind of complete experience. I sought myself, but I couldn’t find myself. A great pleasure grew up, occurred. (Pawle 2003: 196) Harada Roshi spoke of how the “death of his ego” occurred during a conversation while having tea: If I express it in words in my case it happened through a thought. Someone asked me, ‘Where’s the way of the Buddha?’ And then I thought to myself, ‘Where’s the way of the Buddha?’ So I couldn’t say I really knew it, but, ah . . . at that time it’s not a realization of having become one, it’s a feeling or sensation shall I say that everything has disappeared. (Pawle 2003: 214) Harada Roshi said the death of the ego “happens once and is final” (Pawle 2003: 220). A noticeable difference in these descriptions is that while Harada Roshi speaks of a particular event, Tanaka Roshi speaks more of a process. This may reflect the difference between the sudden and gradual schools of Zen. Nevertheless, both affirmed that their egos did vanish, that this is a lived experience, and that it is an important step in psychological development.
Individualism/collectivism I want briefly to place this psychology of Zen within the broader context of the field of cross-cultural psychology. A very popular and also much-debated
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idea in cross-cultural psychology is the concept of individualism/collectivism. One approach to this concept is the ‘self orientation’ (Kagitcibasi 1997: 19–22), the idea of the self as individual or collective. It is interesting to consider the no-self psychology of Zen as an expression of a psychology of a collective self. I think it is important to de-mythologize Zen and understand no-self within a cultural context. In this sense, no-self symbolizes, to use Jungian terminology, an archetype of a collective self. No-self expresses an ideal collective self – a self that is interdependent, contextual, flexible, and whose mental faculties are available as needed according to the situation. A person in Zen reflects the Japanese word for human being, ‘ningen,’ which literally means ‘between people.’ A person in this sense becomes fully human when they are able to be fully in relationship with other people. In my teaching experience, using Hofstede’s Individualism Index (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005: 78–79) as a reference, students who come from collectiveoriented countries easily understand no-self as expressing a collective psychology, whereas students from individualist-oriented countries tend to struggle to understand no-self. When a person extinguishes ego in the Zen sense, rather than becoming a void, the Zen idea is that the inherent personal self blossoms naturally. Evidence for this is the eccentric Zen Masters I have met. Rather than being dull and the same as everyone else, Zen Masters are quite individual – yet they still have a collective sense of self.
Psychological healing in Zen Healing in Zen involves a clarifying of the functioning of the ego, so that one awakens to the inherent limitless self. The basic difficulty in this clarification is that the ego cannot be seen directly or objectively. The ego in its function in mind is like the eyes in that it can only be seen in reflection or through its connections to other mind functions. One of the primary functions of mind Zen utilizes to work with the ego is attention. I want to examine it here as I consider the relationship of the ego and attention generally overlooked by psychology: there is much consideration given to a biological basis of attention problems (Safren 2006), but not so much to an ego basis. One way of living no-self, described earlier, is mind being ‘free to.’ In Zen one description of mental pathology is fixated attention, attention thereby not being available for use as needed. Conversely, one way to describe mental health, or living no-self, is free attention, attention that is available. By focusing attention on a single object, it becomes possible to see the activity of attention: what one commonly discovers is that attention is functioning exclusively in a subject–object way, a way rooted in the ego as a self. Upon realizing no-self, fixated or pathological attention disappears and attention becomes free to function optimally. Working with attention in this way is a means to clarifying the ego. There are two keys to working with attention in the Zen way. The first is
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staying with attention to something, not looking outside oneself, only looking at one’s own activity. And the second is not judging oneself by what arises in this practice. Harada Roshi said this kind of practice is “like tying yourself up with a rope, and then, in that condition, finding your freedom” (personal communication, May 6, 1991). This methodology allows a person to focus on activity in the present rather than on the influence of the past and to work directly with the conscious mind rather than having to go into a trance or dream or such. This also enables therapy to be experience-based. A person in this way attends to experience in the moment; experiences first, evaluates second. Such methodology, when integrated into therapy, can be beneficial.
Conclusion Mind functioning as subject and object is often assumed in Western psychology to be fundamental to mental health. The psychology of Zen offers an alternative way to understand the functioning of mind, one positing the ego as the key function of mind. In this chapter, reports of Zen Masters speaking of their experience of living no-self, living without an ego in the Zen sense, have been examined. Integrating this understanding into psychology provides an understanding of mental health which includes the limits of mind, how psychological development can include the disappearance of the ego, and alternatives in terms of therapeutic work. Further study of this topic will expand the possibilities of psychological work.
Roshis (Zen Masters) quoted (Residence information is at the time of the interviews, 2001–2002.) Sekkei Harada Roshi, abbot of Hosshinji Monastery, Obama, Fukui prefecture. Gikan Nakajima Roshi, priest of Tadakoji Temple, Nagahama, Shiga prefecture. Keido Fukushima Roshi, abbot of Tofukuji Monastery, Kyoto. Sodo Yasunaga Roshi, priest of Shounji Temple, Ikeda, Osaka prefecture. Kanju Tanaka Roshi, priest of Nanyoin Temple, Kyoto.
References Brentano, F. (1973) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clarke, J. (1994) Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, New York: Routledge. Conze, E. (1970) Buddhist Thought in India, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
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Engler, J. (1998) ‘Buddhist psychology: Contributions to Western psychological theory,’ pp. 111–118 in A. Molino (ed.), The Couch and the Tree, New York: North Point Press. Faure, B. (1991) The Rhetoric of Immediacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guenther, H. (1989) From Reductionism to Creativity: rDzogs-chen and the New Sciences of Mind, Boston, MA: Shambhala. Hayward, J. and Varela, F. (eds) (2001) Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, Boston, MA: Shambhala. Hofstede, G. and Hofstede, G. J. (2005) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 2nd ed., New York: McGraw-Hill. Huikai, W. (1977) ‘Mumonkan,’ trans. K. Sekida, in K. Sekida, Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan and Hekiganroku, Tokyo: Weatherhill. (Original work 1228.) Kagitcibasi, C. (1997) ‘Individualism and collectivism,’ in J. Berry, M. Segall and C. Kagitcibasi (eds), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology: Social Behaviour and Applications (vol. 3), Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Kochumuttom, T. (1982) A Buddhist Doctrine of Experience: A New Translation and Interpretation of the Works of Vasubandhu the Yogacarin, Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass. Pawle, R. (2003) ‘The No-self Psychology of Zen Buddhism: Causality, Attachment, and the Manifestation of Fundamental Aliveness,’ Dissertation, UMI Dissertation Services, Number 3080423. Safren, S. (2006) ‘Cognitive-behavioural approaches to ADHD treatment in adulthood.’ Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 67, supplement 8, 46–50. Sasaki, J. (1974) Buddha is the Centre of Gravity, trans. F. Akino, San Cristobal, New Mexico: Lama Foundation.
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Part III Bridges
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Ch 7 Our ordinary sense of self Different aspects of ‘no-self ’ during states of absorption and kensho James H. Austin
The end of the conceit ‘I am’ – that is the truly greatest happiness of all. (Udana 2:11, Pali Canon, Zen meditators)
Zen meditators train attention during both sitting and daily life practice. How else can we conceptualize the process of long-range Zen meditative training? One suggestion is that it involves a deconditioning, the kind that whittles away old maladaptive aspects of the egocentric self. Only then, during decades of gradually re-training our pre-attentive mode of attention, of mindful introspection, of awakenings both gradual and sudden, can a less selfcentered person emerge. This individual, in the course of a long process of ‘re-programming,’ can become increasingly aware, simplified, stable, compassionate, and humane (Austin 1998). From this basic perspective of deconditioning, each individual self begins as an active, tangible (if transient) entity. Figure 7.1 illustrates the ordinary mental field of this individual self. Infants and children become conditioned all too soon to acquire their array of personal assets and liabilities. Among the liabilities developed are the three dysfunctions of selfhood. Reduced to simplified, operational terms, these liabilities are referable to our constructs of ‘I, Me, and Mine.’ Figure 7.2 illustrates how this triad of self occupies the axial center, looking outward into the other world of the external environment. The liabilities of the assertive sovereign I-self are manifested in overt acts of arrogance and aggression. Those of the fearful, vulnerable Me-self generate inner turmoil, feelings of being battered by life and besieged by anxieties. The Me is an object, the target of life’s vicissitudes. The dysfunctions of the intrusive Mine are more subtle. They are observable in the ways children and adults cling to possessions, covet material goods, and cherish their own fixed opinions. This pejorative triad, the ‘ABCs of our I–Me–Mine,’ causes suffering not only during childhood, but at every age. It becomes the basis for adult longings and loathings, and for many unfruitful, overconditioned, egocentric aspects of our personalities.
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Figure 7.1 The ordinary mental field. Stimuli enter from the outer world and from internal proprioceptive events. The blend contributes to our notions that we continue to exist as a central thinking and feeling self.
Recent research suggests that most aspects of our multifaceted self are attributable to defined networks blending their interactions in a variety of subtle functions (Austin 2000, 2006). As one oversimplification, much of the higher levels of our bodily self-image – our soma – are normally represented along posterior pathways that lead up toward the superior parietal region. Yet this major sensory supply into the parietal lobe must first pass through deeper thalamic circuits. In this respect, the thalamus serves as a ‘bottleneck.’ Notably, its GABA – containing reticular nucleus acts as a ‘shield.’ This inhibitory function becomes important when we ask: How can one’s sensate, physical self vanish during some of the superficial states called the ‘absorptions’? Figure 7.3 illustrates the nature of the mental field during internal absorption when this ordinary sense of a somatic self drops out of awareness. However, our ordinary psychic attributes – those of our psyche – are more complex. Although their functions build on the scaffolding of this basic physical axis, the higher-level expressions of our psyche are more referable to networks linking other regions. These associations are elaborated on during interactions that link the cortex of the frontal and temporal lobes, and join in consultation with other parietal, thalamic, limbic, and paralimbic systems. Which ‘ordinary’ psychological functions are included within this second,
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Figure 7.2 The ordinary self/other world of the I–Me–Mine. Our I–Me–Mine is a tightly knit triad. Its complex attributes relate our sensate physical body to our thoughts and emotions. Its I is sovereign. Its Me is a vulnerable target. Its Mine is all possessive. Note how those small, curved arrows of the Mine not only thrust out to clutch at whatever we try to possess in the outer world, they also curve back to attach themselves to our own fixed opinions and other internally biased notions of selfhood.
psychic, category? They represent higher-level integrations of functions that are at once cognitive, emotional, and instinctual. Rarely, some very special experiences arise from unusual changes within our psyche. These novel states expand pre-attentive and intuitive functions in extraordinary ways. Their underlying deconditionings of the self unveil profound, direct insights into the way reality is experienced. The extraordinary insightful states of kensho-satori and Being exemplify such rare moments of experiential realization. Figure 7.4 illustrates the mental field of insightwisdom during kensho-satori. Please note how substantially this more advanced state of ‘awakening’ differs from the earlier state of internal absorption. Moreover, absorptions are also lacking in the potential to transform traits of character. Locked within our ordinary egocentric consciousness, is it intellectually possible to appreciate the nature of any state so devoid of its usual, dominating internal sense of self ? No. Why not? Because we have always inhabited a dual world of our own making, both consciously and subconsciously. We do have a perspective on that ‘other’ outside world at large, but it arises only
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Figure 7.3 The mental field of internal absorption with sensate loss. A major absorption dissolves the bodily self. It effaces the ordinary physical boundaries of the I–Me– Mine. What remains? A witnessed, silent, heightened, clear, ambient awareness. The sensory blockade shuts off not only the stimuli from the outer world. It also shuts off proprioceptive information relayed up from the head and body. Most emotions do not register aside from a pervasive enchantment and bliss.
from the self trapped inside this habitual self/other dichotomy. However, let’s suppose that this usual subjective sense of an inside, egocentric self were to vanish. Does such a moment of ‘no-self ’ imply that consciousness is lost? No. What does happen, as the result of this shift? The residual witnessing awareness now opens up to experience – with utmost clarity and depth of meaning – the whole OTHER covert aspect of this former duality. The technical term for such non-subjective perception is allocentric awareness (allo implies other; ego implies self ). How does this no-self, allocentric field of other-centered perception enter experience? In the extraordinary state of kensho-satori, it is directly experienced as ‘suchness.’ Suchness is the realization that ‘all things are as they really are.’ Figure 7.5 illustrates how, inside the state of kensho-satori, the usual
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Figure 7.4 The mental field of insight-wisdom (kensho-satori). The brain’s intuitive capacities approach their peak. Subjectivity dissolves. A totally unifying objective vision comprehends the whole outside world. The impression is: All things as they REALLY are; immanent, eternal perfection. Fear vanishes because the entire I–Me–Mine drops out at every affective level. (Dashed lines serve only to suggest the location of former boundaries.)
sense of two parallel self/other universes gives way to yield the impression of ‘Oneness.’ After kensho, the stage is set for the individual to enter into a more authentic engagement with the vicissitudes of daily life. This becomes a continuing process of self-analysis. It is a practice that probes much more objectively than before. This daily life practice ripens incrementally, as the result of more refined degrees of clear mindful awareness, of introspection, and of a succession of little insights. On this long-term path of mindful, introspective meditative training, the once-tall arrogant ‘I’ of the earlier problem self is gradually transformed. In what direction? Toward that of a more actualized, lower-case I. The former besieged Me of the anxious self can now become a more buoyant me. Slowly, the clutching Mine of the old pejorative self can
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Figure 7.5 Parallel universes. At the top of this figure, our usual self/other mode is shown. It constructs two separate parallel universes. On the left side of this duality is our own larger, self-centered universe. We’ve always given it the higher priority. Off to the right lies the rest of the world ‘outside’ us. Farther down, however, in a supra-ordinate state of consciousness, egocentricity vanishes. The ordinary world (samsara) and the noumenal world (‘nirvana’) are now perceived as unified within an impression of ‘Oneness.’ At the bottom, after kensho, the former overinflated self (on the left) has become ‘thinner.’ Larger ‘pores’ exist in its formerly rigid boundary. They are intended to suggest that this newly awakened self enters into a fresh appreciation of the outside world, and can engage it actively on terms that are now much more open, direct, and inclusive.
also evolve. How? Into a more compassionate mine. In the total transformation toward a lower profile i–me–mine, egocentricity can yield to allocentricity, a person who cares for others. Allo- is no esoteric prefix. A recently introduced term, allophilia, refers to the openness to experience other human beings with the same positive consideration that one usually extends toward oneself (‘Positive Prejudice’ 2007). Recent neuroimaging and other brain research clarifies the functional anatomy of networks that correlate with our ordinary sense of self/other dualities. These newer findings permit novel perspectives with which to
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interpret the mechanisms underlying our deeper levels of extraordinary perceptual experience. These rare states, having realized selfless insightwisdom, have the potential to transform one’s traits and be actualized in one’s continuing attitudes and behavior (Austin 2009).
References Austin, J. H. (1998) Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —— (2000) ‘Consciousness evolves when the self dissolves,’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(11–12), 209–230. —— (2006) Zen-Brain Reflections: Reviewing Recent Developments in Meditation and States of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —— (2009) Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ‘Positive prejudice: Really loving your neighbor’ (2007) The Economist, March 17, 66.
Chapter 8
Similarities, differences, and implications in the patient– analyst and student–spiritual teacher relationship Stanley G. Perelman
A relationship with a psychotherapist and a relationship with a spiritual teacher are two of the most powerful, intense, and influential relationships a person may have. The intent and purpose of each may be very different, but as both involve intimacy and power, it is likely there will be distortions and projections as intrinsic aspects of these relationships. Transference, which is a study of these distortions and projections, has been covered extensively in the professional literature, but usually from the therapist’s perspective, as a function of resistance and pathology. Much has been written about the student–spiritual teacher relationship, but, in this case, it is usually from a ‘guidebook to proper conduct’ perspective. Although there are writings from actual experience, they tend to be less systematic and more anecdotal (Berzin 2000; Rig’dzin 2003). Many spiritual practitioners, particularly in the West, as part of their own growth and development, have been in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. I have had a meditation practice for 40 years and been connected to Tibetan Buddhist practice for about 10 years. I have been in psychoanalysis and completed Jungian Analytic training in 1987. Many people come to their spiritual practice through psychotherapy; some may have been spiritual practitioners in youth only to realize they needed therapy later. But we know these experiences are not mutually exclusive, indeed, are often complementary. How then are these relationships similar and different? Both in therapy and in spiritual practice, the quality of the relationship with our therapist and our teacher is often the focus of the work. In therapy, Jungians talk about projections of the ‘Self ’ onto the therapist (Edinger 1972; Humbert 1984). In Buddhist spiritual practice, the teacher is often referred to as incarnating ‘the Buddha nature.’ What does this mean? And what does it mean from the experience of the patient and the student? These are some of the questions I hoped to answer as I put together thoughts on researching this topic. I wished to contribute to our understanding of these issues by interviewing people who had been in analytic therapy and were mature spiritual practitioners about their experiences with their therapists and teachers. I wanted to find out how these experiences were similar and different, particularly in the areas of transference and ‘otherness.’
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To investigate the similarities and differences, I decided to ask about the course and quality of the relationship, expectations, feeling states, and dreams. My investigation was by no means exhaustive, rather a preliminary qualitative exploration with a few subjects. Once I analyzed the material from an experiential perspective, I turned to literature discussing the concepts of self and no-self, relating to a spiritual teacher, and some of the literature on transference for corroboration, or to elaborate differences between theory and the actual experiences described. Since I am most familiar with Tibetan Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, these are the primary theoretical grounds from which I approach the material. I spoke with seven people, recording and transcribing the interviews: four men and three women from their late forties through fifties. Although they have a broad background in many spiritual traditions, five are mainly Tibetan Buddhists, one has come to vipassana after many years practicing Zen, and one follows Esoteric Judaism after being with Hindu teachers for many years. All are professionals in the field of psychology. These are the questions I asked these people. I invite you to consider them as if they were directly addressed to you. Jot down any thoughts, memories, associations, or images which come into mind. Then you may see how my findings and conclusions speak to your own personal experience. The questions which follow are the same for the therapist relationship and the relationship with the spiritual teacher.
• • • • • • • • • •
What was the background for your coming to your therapist and your spiritual teacher? How did you know about him or her? What were your first impressions? How has your relationship developed over time? What have been the intense moments? Have you had any doubts? If so, how have you dealt with them? How have your feelings towards your therapist and spiritual teacher been worked with? What dreams have you had of your therapist and spiritual teacher? How have dreams been worked with? If your relationship with your therapist and spiritual teacher has ended, what were the circumstances? When you think of your therapist and spiritual teacher now, what are your thoughts and feelings? How has your view of yourself changed over the years through therapy and spiritual work?
These questions elicited intimate and open conversations. I thank all the participants for sharing their deep and personal experiences with such trust. In the course of the interviews many themes emerged. I would like to mention and elaborate five. First is the theme of the container; second, the
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theme of purpose; third, the theme of the nature of the relationship; fourth, the experience of the otherness; and fifth, dreams, which cuts across the other categories. The themes are not absolutely separate. Think of them as areas of emphasis. I will also discuss the way dreams function to intensify and comment on these themes.
Container The container is the context giving the possibility of the therapeutic or spiritual work to occur. Jungians sometimes speak of it as the temenos – a Greek word for the sacred precinct around a temple (Edinger 1972). Other therapists refer to it as the frame. We might think of it as the essential environment. There were strong similarities in the experience of the therapist and the spiritual teacher with respect to the construction and maintenance of the container. From the patient or student side, participants spoke of feeling comfortable and cared for. They described a feeling of being welcomed. One said when speaking of his therapist, “I had a great sense of permission.” Another spoke of his teacher’s presence and receptivity. There was also a similarity in the experience of the therapist and the spiritual teacher around the sense of ‘space.’ One said of his teacher, “He holds the space for my being.” Another participant stated, “I expected for her to hold that place for me, to dump whatever I needed to and work through my ego issues.” There was an important difference between the experience of the nature of the support from the therapist and the nature of support from the spiritual teacher. It was clear that experience of the therapist as creator of a safe space in which to work was dependent on him or her personally. There was no reference in any of the interviews to the theoretical background of the therapist. However, it was the unanimous experience of all participants that the spiritual teachers were supported by the connection to their entire lineage and tradition as they created a container. For example, one said, “It was a bigger context. The whole lineage is a support. He is part of this whole lineage energy. The whole manner of organization, programs, teachings, the choreographic structure; all became influential.” Another said being in his teacher’s presence was like having a “cascading avalanche of teachings raining down on me.” This was the first hint for me there might be what could be characterized as a transpersonal element in the relationship with the spiritual teacher. There were also experiences of transgressive breaks in the container, when the therapist or spiritual teacher could not maintain a space secure or comfortable enough to engage with the painful and unsettling material intrinsic to psychotherapeutic and spiritual work. The issue emerging here was the integrity of the therapist or spiritual teacher. When that integrity was compromised, the container collapsed and the person left. In these interviews, the breaks of integrity involved violations of sexual boundaries and psychological
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safety. It is interesting that the issue of integrity was very personal. Typically, the therapist’s breach of integrity spoiled the entire experience for the patient. There was no working-through of this violation. With the spiritual teacher, though, the breach of personal integrity did not seem to destroy the respect and value the student had in his teacher’s capacity to convey the dharma. The importance of the teacher’s personality was not denied and several of the participants reported leaving their teacher. But the experience and learning was not spoiled, as it was with the therapist.
Purpose There was great overlap for the participants as they described their purpose in seeking out therapy and in seeking connection with a spiritual teacher. One person spoke of seeking a therapist as a search for the good father; he related his motivation for seeking his spiritual teachers as being similar. However, another participant said when he went to his therapist it was not to alleviate any particular symptoms, but “to learn more about myself and life.” He also said he was not looking for a spiritual teacher, just wanting to learn more about the mind. But there was a tendency, at least in retrospect, to say the search for a therapist was driven by personal problems. One said, “I intuitively knew there had been trauma in my past.” Another said when he entered therapy he was “a wild person.” And with respect to the search for a spiritual teacher most people said they wanted something beyond “personal stuff.” One said she “wanted more than to know about relationships. I saw my personal problems like a cork floating on a vast ocean.” I think the confusion and overlap here has to do with the multidetermined and often unconscious motivations for our behavior. People do things, make choices, and only later realize the meaning and motivations for their actions.
Nature of the relationship All participants could see that much of their experience with their therapist was based on, as one person said, “reactions and relationship feelings . . . which were arising from me, my own psyche.” People described their therapists variously as “a good mentor,” “a Jewish mother,” “a mother who understood me,” “a kind and respectful father,” knowing this was part of their idealizing transferences. The relationship to the therapist and transferences evolving out of the relationship were central to the therapy. Many of the participants focused on the importance of the therapist’s capacity to tolerate, welcome, and process intense emotions, however distorted. One said, “I had permission to be direct about things that weren’t nice or reasonable. The relationship was the vehicle for insight into myself.” Some actively worked on distortions in the relationship, analyzing and understanding transferences, which illuminated aspects of their own psyches. Others
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simply lived out the reparative aspects of the therapist’s willingness to hold the idealizing transference and use it wisely. Respect for the patient seems crucial in the therapeutic relationship. Where the transference was used in the service of keeping the relationship distant and impersonal, the person felt wounded, humiliated, and generally terrible about himself/herself. When the transferences were respected and dealt with skillfully and humanely, the therapy was a positive experience, and there was a relationship of mutual respect and even love. The relationship with their spiritual teacher that participants describe has some similarities to their relationship with their therapist. But the intensity of affects is quite different. Whereas participants spoke of their therapists with feelings of gratitude and love, the same people either began to become tearful as they spoke of their spiritual teacher or related instances where they felt intensely emotional. One person said, “I became tearful in his presence.” Another said, “I started crying tears of joy.” Another, recounting experiences during retreats, said, “I felt tears of gratitude and joy welling up, though in a way it’s not about the teacher.” Finally, one said after meeting her teacher for the first time, “I had an interview with him and cried.” All of the participants expressed these feelings of intense love, gratitude, and devotion. One recounted an experience in which his teacher said the purpose of the teachings was “to make you cry,” and cry he did. Another asked his teacher, “Why is it that every time you speak I cry?” The teacher replied, “Because you have come home.” So there is an intensity of emotion. First meetings were characterized by this intensity of feeling. With the therapists, participants spoke of comfortableness, mild disappointment, or being impressed with the therapist’s skills and knowledge. The tone and quality of first meetings with the spiritual teacher was quite different. For example, one person said, “When I looked at him, I felt my heart open. He started talking and I said ‘he’s my teacher.’ There was instant recognition.” Even though there might be an understanding of the transferential quality of the connection, participants felt an authenticity of experience. “He began to speak and I felt like I fell in love with him. It was father transference. I felt a tremendous connection. When he started speaking I felt my heart open as if I knew him deeply from somewhere else.” Curiously, she added, “It was nothing personal at the beginning.” Finally, I would like to describe the experience of one participant who had two different teachers. The intensity was similar but the energy of the experience was quite different. With his first teacher he recounts how he attended a talk and afterwards wanted to go up to the teacher and express his gratitude. He said: I looked into his eyes and he was so present. It was like a vast space, only extreme warmth. Then he grabbed me by my long hair. And my mind stopped. Then he bumped his head against mine, which in Tibetan
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Buddhism is a symbol for intimacy. You touch heads. My mind was so clear. There was no thought; there was nothing but this brilliance. He also describes an incident, many years later, with his current teacher. They happened to be walking down the street together: Out of nowhere, leaping in front of us was an old mangy gray-haired dog. It was tumorous, dripping with pus, and smelling, and there were flies buzzing around it. It opened its mouth and I froze. Without hesitation or reservation, this fellow dropped to his knees, began saying a spontaneous mantra and blowing on the pus and sores on its legs. The dog’s eyes got wide, it froze, it just stood there on its three workable legs, and pretty soon its tail started wagging. And as quickly as he went down on his knees, he got up and walked off. I was still in a suspended state. All at once time came back. At that moment I felt bonded to this guy in light of his spontaneity and great compassion. I felt small and insignificant but only in the sense of seeing what great possibilities there were in the universe. Although the participants described their relationship with their teachers as very intimate, this was not based on the duration of time spent together or the sharing of personal issues. All said they felt known even if they met individually only 15 minutes per year. One person said, “The interviews felt very personal. I felt very deeply, transpersonally known.” This being known, however, was not based on sharing of personal issues. The focus on the personal time with the spiritual teacher is about the practice; neither personal problems nor transference issues are discussed. For example, one said, “He teaches from another plane. He talks about practice. He answered all my questions about my practice. He doesn’t ask about the personal.” Another said, “I felt the intensity of being loved and connected right there, but only in terms of the teaching.” Finally, a participant said that when transference issues would arise the message was, “You deal with it. Channel it back into the practice.” He described witnessing a student complaining to his teacher about not getting enough personal time with him. The teacher gestured with his hand like throwing paper into a garbage can. Just let it go. Another quality in the relationship about which the participants were unanimous was experiencing their teacher as always teaching. Again and again came statements like, “He was always teaching.” Or, “He couldn’t not teach.” Or, “He was teaching all the time.” It was that “he embodies the teachings with his ability and spontaneity,” as one said. And yet all of the participants were clear to differentiate the teacher as a human being with human failings, and as spiritual teacher embodying the teachings and traditions of the lineage. One said of her teacher, “He was very much a human being. He could blast people. But he was kind to me.” Or, “I had reservations
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about him as a person. He is very obsessional. But he answered all my questions.” Another said, “It’s not like I wanted to be like him. I was not, I guess, really interested in him. He was much better at a distance.”
Dreams The participants all recalled that dreams were generally welcomed in therapy. If they arose, they were taken up and worked with transferentially, when it seemed appropriate. Perhaps because many of the participants’ therapies happened years ago, none really had memorable dreams they could still recount that were central to their relationship with their therapists. On the other hand, with respect to their relationship to their spiritual teacher, there were vivid dream experiences. The teachers themselves were consistent in their responses to the dreams, though their attitudes differed. Some of the teachers dismissed dreams as irrelevant to the practice, products of the deluded mind. Others seemed to value them as signposts of the practitioner’s development. All listened politely without commenting on any personal aspects of the dream. Interestingly, the participants again were quite clear these dreams had less to do with the person of the spiritual teacher than with his/her role as teacher and lineage-holder of the teachings. Often the dreams were experienced as teachings. I will describe a few of them. One dreamed: I was out in a parking lot with him and it might have been at a retreat. He was there only a few feet between the two of us. And I looked at him and he winked at me. And I said to him, ‘why is it I have such difficulty seeing myself as a Buddha?’ And immediately my teacher responded, ‘because I’m so much like you.’ His analysis of the dream as a teaching was, “My teacher was saying to me, I project on to him my ordinary sense of self, but because I identify only with that, it’s hard for me to see that there’s something else going on here, which is my Buddha self.” Another, after separation from her teacher for many years and meeting up with him again, reported, “He taught me in dreams for five or so consecutive nights. I told him and he was impressed. But he didn’t want to talk about it. I thought I was making up for lost time.” Finally there is a dream which may sum up the quality of the experience of the participants with their spiritual teacher: There are these rolling, beautiful grassy hills. In medieval style there are tents, torches and everything down in the meadow, and there is this beautiful lane. I come up to a line of people under this canopy and they are being served wonderful food and there is music and dancing. And all at once my teacher appears and he holds out a tray for me and says, ‘this is
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for you’ and he begins spooning up different-colored, lively, delicious food on different places on this big round tray. And he keeps going, and there are many different fruits. I see they are food but they don’t look like human food. And I look down and it’s this big mandala. And I look at him and he winks and gives me a tender hug. It was like a goodbye, a graduation. Everything was complete. I look down and the food turns into a rainbow. And that was my last dream of him. He had been dead for many years.
Experience of ‘otherness’ All of the participants experienced different varieties and intensities of projection with their therapists and spiritual teachers. With the therapists we could talk about mother and father transferences, and perhaps transferences around what Jungians might call the ‘Self.’ By the ‘Self,’ I mean here Jung’s concept, the super-ordinate organizing principle of the psyche, a unification of conscious and unconscious, imaged typically as mandalas, God images, or wisdom beings, and experienced with intense affect as feelings of completeness and wholeness or as divine connection. The important idea is not what the transference was, but that it was definitely transference, a distortion of the reality of the relationship and of the therapist, which arises from aspects of the patient’s psyche. Everyone found the experience of transference and its analysis useful in their own self-discovery process, particularly when it was used in a welcoming and respectful manner. Participants were able to differentiate transferential experiences of their therapists from the therapist’s own personality. The relationship with the spiritual teacher is more complicated. Tibetan Buddhist teaching is clear about the power of the transference. It is said that if you experience your teacher as a human being you will receive the blessings of a human being. If you experience your teacher as a Bodhisattva, a living Buddha who has vowed to reincarnate until all sentient beings have achieved enlightenment, you will receive the blessings of a Bodhisattva. And if you experience your teacher as a Buddha, you will receive the blessings of a Buddha. This points to the understanding that the student brings his/her own subjectivity into the relationship with the teacher. In the central Tantric practice of Guru Yoga, one visualizes the Guru outside one’s body, experiences the projection with all its intensity, and reintegrates those qualities back into oneself. In the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Longchempa’s You Are the Eyes of the World, translators Kennard Lipman and Merrill Peterson describe Guru Yoga as “dealing with the archetype of the Self, one’s own wholeness, through the mechanisms of transference and projection” (2000: 62). Furthermore, they suggest it is “very important to understand that the guru means the unification of all transmissions and should not be confused with the personality of the teacher” (p. 63). The participants in this study, as
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mature practitioners, were able to make this differentiation and work with these archetypal, transpersonal energies. From my own background in Tibetan Buddhism, I wonder if something else is revealed in these interviews. For example, is there is a difference between projecting one’s own Buddha nature, or no-self, onto the teacher, and recognizing the teacher as manifesting his/her own realization of non-dual reality (Magid 2002; Meckel and Moore 1992; Muramoto and Young-Eisendrath 2002)? Is there a difference between ‘recognition’ and ‘projection’? If these teachers were, in fact, stabilized in the Nature of Mind, as Tibetan Buddhists would conceptualize living in the absolute ground of reality, or the no-self, and the students perceived it, the experience of the participants would not be transference or projection, and does not fit easily into our Western psychological categories. John Suler, in Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought (1993), discusses his ideas on self and no-self and suggests the “no-self is the formless context in which an experience occurs – a type of pre-psychological ‘space’ that enables the creation of the self-as-structure” (p. 51). Furthermore, he implies that one behaving out of this “space” would act with “unselfconscious spontaneity” grounded in the everyday, yet also simultaneously grounded in the infinite (p. 52). Holding these ideas in mind, we can again look to Tibetan Buddhist thought for help in understanding more clearly what these people were experiencing. Three aspects of the person are described in the literature: personality manifestation, energy manifestation, and wisdom manifestation. The personality manifestation is our ordinary human nature, based on our body, experiences, and culture, which might be obsessional, kind, irritable, unconventional, or whatever. These varieties of personality were described both with the spiritual teachers and with the therapists. The energy manifestation is more subtle. For example, one teacher was filled with compassionate energy, another with demanding, commanding, wrathful energy. One teacher was described as unpredictable, “like a bolt of lightning.” The same could be said of the therapists. These are the qualities I think which are important in what we might call the “interpersonal fit” which needs to be right with either therapist or spiritual teacher. The wisdom aspect is different, though. It is the manifestation of no-self, ground of being, Dharmakaya, or however we name this unnameable reality (Namdak 1992; Wangyal 1993). It was easy for the participants to see the personality and energy of their therapists. The wisdom manifestation may be projected on either therapist or spiritual teacher, as sage, mentor, or teacher. When these projections were withdrawn and integrated, the therapist was experienced more realistically. But with the spiritual teacher it was always clear. Though the personality might be difficult and the energy problematic, the wisdom manifestation of the teacher was always experienced and never doubted. As we see from the interview descriptions, the participants experienced their teachers very much as Suler described, grounded in everyday life,
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yet, at the same time, manifesting behaviors and qualities of teaching that were from, as one person called it, “another plane.” And this led to feelings of profound gratitude and devotion. Is this projection or recognition? Of course, from a Western psychological perspective, understanding it as projection fits better within the conceptual framework. However, I think that the evidence from these interviews points to the need for us to open our minds to other, more intriguing possibilities.
References Berzin, A. (2000) Relating to a Spiritual Teacher, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Press. Edinger, E. (1972) Ego and Archetype, New York: Penguin Books. Humbert, E. (1984) C. G. Jung, trans. R. J. Jalbert, Wilmette, IL: Chiron. Longchempa (2000) You Are the Eyes of the World, trans. K. Lipman and M. Peterson, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Press. Magid, B. (2002) Ordinary Mind, Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Meckel, D. J. and Moore, R. L. (eds) (1992) Self and Liberation: The Jung Buddhism Dialogue, New York: Paulist Press. Muramoto, S. and Young-Eisendrath, P. (eds) (2002) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, New York: Taylor and Francis. Namdak, L. T. (1992) Bonpo Dzochen Teachings, trans. and ed. J. M. Reynolds, Amsterdam: Bonpo Translation Project. Rig’dzin, D. (2003) Dangerous Friend: The Teacher/Student Relationship in Vajrayana Buddhism, Boston, MA: Shambhala Press. Suler, J. R. (1993) Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought, New York: SUNY. Trungpa, C. (1976) The Myth of Freedom, Boulder, CO: Shambhala Press. Wangyal, T. (1993) Wonders of the Natural Mind, New York: Station Hill Press.
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Part IV
Psychotherapy theory
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Chapter 9
No-self and the emptying God Dwelling in the emptying place Melvin E. Miller
Form is emptiness; emptiness is form . . . (The Heart Sutra) A thing can never be unless it both is and is not. (Bion 1965: 103) How, from a fire that never sinks or sets, would you escape? (Heraclitus, Fragments, 2001: 19)
Introduction At the 1999 Conference on Buddhism and Psychoanalysis in Kyoto, I proposed that psychoanalytic neutrality and the psychoanalytic relationship, working together, provide a groundwork from which the patient (or meditator) could begin to experience a sense of emptiness and an emerging awareness of emptiness or sunyata (Miller 2002). I suggested it took a neutral environment combined with the safety of a secure relationship with an analyst, a teacher, or a Sangha, to promote an awareness of something akin to sunyata – the focus of this chapter. Please note, I emphasize something akin to emptiness, the reasons for this will become clearer. I am going to discuss phenomenological and clinical aspects of sunyata awareness, the circumstances and environments making this awareness possible, and the mindset necessary to maintain it. Can this be done? Can people ‘dwell in the emptying place’? Can such experiences be held on to, or must they be shied away from? I will consider the kinds of fears and anxieties emerging for some individuals during a process of intrapsychic exploration. Must one divert one’s glance from the awareness of nothingness or the void? Must one turn one’s awareness away from an acute experience of emptiness – as in Judaism when one is admonished to divert one’s eyes from the glance of Yahweh (Exodus 3)? I am speaking primarily as a psychologist–psychoanalyst, and not as a Buddhist scholar nor a Western theologian. I can’t emphasize this enough.
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My approach to this material is from the perspective of a clinician who has shared with clients the experience of an increased awareness of emptiness, approximating an awareness of sunyata.
Definitions of sunyata The notion of sunyata, or emptiness, has been debated for over two thousand years by some of the greatest thinkers in the Buddhist traditions – including Buddha himself. Sunyata can be thought of as the conception of Ultimate Reality in certain Buddhist sects. From a monotheistic perspective, it is not the more primitive concept of God as father figure, but rather the later notion of God as an ineffable creative force (cf. Cobb and Ives and The Emptying God). From the perspective of thirteenth-century Jewish mysticism, it is a God without limits; nothing can be said about this God. We can’t see ‘it,’ can’t really describe it, can’t experience it: “God is the one about whom nothing at all can be said, not even, in a way, this, since saying inevitably suggest limits” (Borowitz 1990: 87). Masao Abe (1990) and others note that the Zen roots of the concept of sunyata, or emptiness, go back at least as far as Nagarjuna (150–250 ). In his Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way; Garfield 1995), Nagarjuna vividly portrayed the many faces of emptiness – and its relentless, ubiquitous quality. Thurman (1991) described more than twenty manifestations of emptiness – some metaphysical, others more everyday. Over the years, most writers seem to have portrayed emptiness or sunyata as a metaphysical construct – as an iconic representation of Ultimate Reality. Austin has leaned in this same metaphysical direction, although he stated: “You can’t begin to grasp Zen emptiness from the outside. It must be experienced” (1998: 570). Theologian and Zen practitioner Robert Gunn (2000) unabashedly conceptualized the experience of emptiness as an experience of loss: be it a loss of a loved one, of identity, of a coherent sense of self, of a sense of future, or of meaning in life. And, he says, there were repeated experiences of emptiness occurring in multitudinous forms throughout the lives of spiritual seekers such as Do¯ gen, Jung, and Merton. Each grappled with his own version of the “Dark Night of the Soul” (periods of emptiness and meaningless) time and time again throughout his respective spiritual journey. Payne (2002), a theologian and Buddhism expert, took issue with Gunn over the matter of “experiencing emptiness.” Payne offered this correction: There is no such thing as emptiness which may itself be experienced. One cannot experience an absence of something. . . . Speaking of the ‘experience of emptiness’ creates the danger of reifying emptiness as something that can be experienced. (2002: 182–183, emphasis added)
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But Payne also noted how in some Buddhist groups there has been talk of the “direct, intuitive comprehension of emptiness” (p. 183). This caveat notwithstanding, the stricter position articulated by Payne is consistent with the philosophical stance of Masao Abe (1990), who gave the following description of Dynamic Sunyata: The ultimate reality for Buddhism is . . . Sunyata. Sunyata literally means ‘emptiness’ or ‘voidness’ and can imply ‘absolute nothingness’. This is because Sunyata is entirely unobjectifiable, unconceptualizable, and unattainable by reason or will. . . . Sunyata completely empties everything, including itself. That is to say, the pure activity of absolute emptying is true Sunyata. (Abe in Cobb and Ives 1990: 27, emphasis added) To illustrate the ‘unobjectifiability’ of sunyata, Abe placed an ‘X’ over the word, much as Heidegger (1962) did with his term Sein or “being.” There has been much controversy surrounding terms like sunyata, emptiness, and nothingness. I hope a broader conceptualization of emptiness, keeping to fundamentals, will prove instructive. It appears to me that sunyata can be viewed in at least two different ways: (a) as a metaphysical concept; or (b) as an experience as experience. In his thought-provoking paper, ‘Nishitani revisited,’ Van Bragt seems to have arrived at a similar conclusion. He asks: “Is emptiness as the deconstruction of the false views that lead to attachment and suffering identical with emptiness as the first principle of reality?” (1998: 80). Here again we find the more experiential side of the coin opposite the metaphysical. As a psychologist, I am inclined to approach sunyata from an experiential perspective. I want to know which early steps might lead people to a deeper and more profound experience of sunyata. These beginning steps may eventually lead to a greater philosophical understanding of sunyata as a representation of Ultimate Reality. For now I will focus on the awareness of emerging, unfolding emptiness, the awareness of nothingness, and let it go at that.
Bion’s notion of O Wilfred Bion, a twentieth-century psychoanalyst, gave much thought to these matters. He was particularly interested in religious, mystical, and fragmented psychological self-experiences at various nodal points in human development. He is notorious for inventing a shorthand for labeling some of the features depicting the dynamics and complexity of deep psychological life, F = Faith, K = Knowledge, L = Love (1965, 1970). It is his notion of O, the unknowable ultimate reality, which is most relevant to this discussion (1965: 140). According to Eigen (1998: 77):
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Bion’s O is zero, a null state, emptiness, void, nothingness, a quasioriental O. [It is] . . . analytic openness with pregnant emptiness, creative darkness, the power of non-existence, the goodness of absolute vacuity, the matrix of the sense of self, the divine ground of one’s being, the experience of breathing. And, elsewhere: O is for the orgasmic element that permeates, charges, and sustains experiencing. O is for One, one God, one cosmos, whose streamings we are. O is a circle, the rounds and rhythms of life, eternal returns and reversals, crisscrossing currents, a geometrical representation of the constructive-containing mind that pulsations explode, the Opening of the O. (Eigen 1998: 39–40) Bion’s concept of O is as complex, as versatile, and at times as ambiguous and incomprehensible as the notion of sunyata. It too can be understood as an ultimate point of metaphysical reference, or as a complex set of psychological experiences. I am not implying that sunyata and O are equivalent, though this has been argued (cf. Eigen, Milner 1987, Lacan). What I am suggesting is this: An understanding of Bion’s O is going to help deepen our understanding of sunyata and sunyata-like experiences. And I will suggest that some of the odd and frightening O-like experiences which arise while sitting in either psychotherapy or meditation – may help prepare the client/ student for an eventual deeper understanding of sunyata. Bion’s most straightforward definition of O, although one he never liked, is: “O is the ultimate [Object]” (Bion 1965: 151). He states: “this is an oversimplification . . . [and] it . . . perhaps [would be] too mathematical to call it infinity, too mystical to call it the infinite, too religious to call it the Godhead” (p. 150). You can see here Bion vigorously wrestling with how to describe O. As if he is continuously asking himself: “How mystical (metaphysical and/or religious) a notion do I let it be, versus how psychological – even psychopathological?” His most succinct attempt to summarize O, and perhaps the place where it most closely resembles sunyata is found here, as he draws upon Milton’s Paradise Lost: The rising world of waters dark and deep Won from the void and formless infinite. Paradise Lost, Book III (quoted in Bion 1965: 151) This seems to get closer to the deepest sense of O. Bion also declares: “O represents the realness of anything” (1965: 147) that people truly fear. “One wants and fears nothing more than what is real – something or someone real”
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[Eigen 1998: 82; cf. Lacan’s (1977, 1978) register of the Real]. O in this context represents “psychic reality” – that which is psychically real (Bion 1965: 125). People (analysand and analyst, student and teacher) want and fear the psychological experience of the Real (a merging with the maternal; the awesome fear of unspeakable trauma). It’s that sense of staring God (the Emptying God) in the eye, exciting and scary. Eigen, a contemporary Bionian, attempts to further reflect Bion’s struggle with the mysticising versus psychologizing distinction in these remarks: Bion pays homage to the mysticism of old – the Changeless Eternal Infinite, the all potential formless Void, O itself. But he also opens to a mysticism of changing moments, a dynamic restless O [cf. Abe’s Dynamic Sunyata]. We meet O not simply as peace, but turbulence, even catastrophe. We can not keep up with incessantly evolving O . . . since we are O, part of O, . . . [both analysand and analyst; both student and teacher]. But what if O or part of O is mad or partly mad? (1998: 20, emphasis added) Bion often emphasized what some might call the negative aspects of O, such as self (and ego) disintegration: “The emotional state of transformations in O is akin to dread . . .” (1970: 46). Here is an excerpt from a clinical session with one of my patients, illustrating the dread of which Bion speaks: I can’t [go there yet]. Not yet. I would get lost in the ether; I’d fall into the abyss; I’d get lost in nothingness. What if this emptiness were infinite? This place has no edges. There would be nothing to hold on to; there would be no handholds to keep me from flying off into nothingness. How terrifying this is. I’ve got to stop altogether. Don’t let me go there. I would get lost in emptiness. Consider: There are many Os and many O-like experiences encountered by our patients and students. They may differ in depth or magnitude, but when one is experiencing something O-like, it seems very, very big to the one experiencing it. According to Bion (1965), all Os are likely to be transformative. Each O-like experience works at deconstructing the old defences, the old sense of self, while at the same time contributing to the momentum of the transformation process. In this context, I am once again reminded of Thurman’s (1991) list of the twenty emptinesses – each of which can have a role in transformative experiences. There are many interlocking conceptual connections between this chapter and the broader ‘self/no-self’ controversy. Briefly, the capacity for no-self or non-self (Anatman) experience, often enhanced by the motivation and desire to experience it, is a corollary of, if not a prerequisite for, the more in-depth awareness of sunyata. Bion’s notion of O may not be quite the same
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as sunyata, but considering their parallels helps us make sense of some of the existential and emotional experiences occurring in the two vibrant caldrons of transformation in which we practice: the consulting room and the sangha.
The encounter with emptiness I am primarily concerned with how the existential, experiential qualities of sunyata, the awareness of impermanence, of eternal emptiness, of nothingness (Heidegger 1962; Tillich 1959), impact on the thinking and emotions of patients and meditators. I am interested in those moments in the analytic hour or meditative process when people confront this awareness. What patients label as nothingness (emptiness, the void) can be extremely destabilizing, disintegrating, demoralizing. This seems to be especially true for uninformed, uninstructed Westerners (Abe 1998) who experience it for the first time, be they psychoanalytic patients or students of Zen. This confrontation with nothingness, with emptiness, with O – and all its related confusion and torment (coupled with its corresponding transformative possibilities) – lies at the heart of this chapter. Think again for a moment of the patient who enters psychotherapy or the Zen student who begins a serious practice. No matter how much a longing for the awareness of emptiness (impermanence, nothingness, sunyata) might be in the back of someone’s mind (perhaps in the unconscious; Freud 1920) as they enter a psychotherapeutic or meditative process, the actual encounter with emptiness is an altogether different thing than anything ever imagined or anticipated. There is often something astounding (if not outright traumatic) that occurs when one comes face to face with emptiness of any sort in the analytic hour – especially for the relatively inexperienced patient or student. Again, from a patient: It is very dark . . . in there. It feels like an emptiness. . . . I’d have a hard time being at that place . . . let alone staying there. . . . Don’t let me go there. I am afraid. . . . I am afraid I’ll get lost. I am afraid I will die. Patients come to psychotherapy or psychoanalysis for a wide variety of reasons. Likewise, people are motivated to begin a meditation practice for diverse reasons. Nevertheless, they usually want to alter something fundamental in their lives; they are seeking some kind of change or transformation. Some might enter therapy wishing for the elimination or reduction of an overt, troubling symptom neurosis (a phobia, obsessive-compulsiveness). Others might hope to attenuate gnawing, disconcerting, free-floating anxiety. Perhaps they feel they have nowhere to turn; they are feeling stuck, deadended, alarmed, and adrift. Conventional psychological thinkers might label these as symptoms of a severe depression or as evidence of some other form of psychopathology – a psychotic break, even madness.
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I will argue to the contrary – as does Mirabai Starr (2002) in her book on Saint John of the Cross (and his Dark Night of the Soul), and Bernadette Roberts (1982, 1989, 1991) in her writings from a Christian perspective on the essential experience of no-self. In brief, it seems an encounter with the void (nothingness, emptiness, something akin to Bion’s O) is an absolutely essential threshold or transition experience on the way to a deeper and more profound awareness of the metaphysical version of Ultimate Reality (of sunyata). Though many people enter therapy and meditation for the simplest and most practical of reasons, they often begin to arrive at intense, troubling, seemingly bottomless existential places in the process. They may need to confront frightening and horrific realizations about past traumas, repressed material, even faulty concepts of reality. Something experienced as intensely as a direct confrontation with emptiness might feel like facing a monster, or gods, or demons, a terrifying nothingness, perhaps even death. The therapeutic relationship creates a safe place to talk about this so the patient can access ever deeper levels of awareness, leading to a life-transformative experience, an encounter with O, or emerging sunyata. Here is material from analytic sessions which illustrates how awareness of emptiness might emerge in the treatment process.
Clinical examples I describe a patient who met with me for psychoanalytic sessions multiple times per week over the past four to five years. She is highly educated, has religious and spiritual interests, and a persistent (if not dogged) interest in transformative experiences, though she has been frightened of them. I present these examples chronologically. Sometimes she would speak of O-like material in back-to-back sessions; other times a few weeks or months would pass between expressions of O-related material. Mid-way through the second year of the analysis she was struggling. In one session she said: To explore myself this way is a fairly scary thing to do. The deeper I get into my inner self, the more unclear it all feels. It is very dark and amorphous in there. Who am I? I don’t know [self vs. no-self ]. It feels like an emptiness. If I got to go into it . . . I’d have a hard time being at that place . . . let alone staying there. . . . Don’t let me go there! [almost pleading] Don’t make me go there. I am afraid. . . . I am afraid I’ll get lost. I am afraid I will die. . . . I’ve got to go into it. . . . But, there would be nothing to hold on to. That’s what would be so scary. There is a feeling of falling – and it feels bottomless. Up to this point, she had been sitting on the edge of her seat, session after session, day after day. She would stare at me intently, as if to hold herself from falling into the nothingness. She articulated this fear directly. Sometimes
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she spoke of it as falling into the abyss, other times into the more prosaic “bottom of the barrel.” Though after several months she had not yet begun to lie on the couch in the more typical analytic position, she began to get comfortable free associating. She was repeatedly surprised at the unusual, unexpected psychological material that was loosened. This patient had a profound experience that shook the foundations of her world. Teetering on the edge of the abyss was a difficult and painful emotional experience for her, but she stayed with it, session after session, week after week. Entreaties such as “be there” and “keep me safe” were often articulated, and she implored me to not ‘make her go there.’ She wanted me to protect her, to not let her feel too vulnerable. She regarded me as fully responsible for whatever happened in the session, for the direction and tempo of the process. We worked through her fears and longings, and pivotal interpretations were made with respect to the transference and our relationship. For example, she at times saw me as her strict father, at times as a super-ego-driven priest, and most often as a demanding task master. All of this continues to be interpreted within the transference–countertransference field. And, as we shall see, the intersubjective and relational dimensions of this therapy continue to be especially critical components of the process. At some point further into the treatment process, I invited her to use the couch as a way of deepening the experience. I wanted to loosen up and encourage the free association process. She protested; she dug in her heels. From the patient: I can’t. Not yet. I would get lost in the ether; I’d fall into the abyss; I’d get lost in nothingness. What if this emptiness were infinite? This place has no edges. There would be nothing to hold on to; there would be no handholds to keep me from flying off into nothingness. How terrifying this is. I’ve got to stop altogether. Don’t let me go there. I would get lost in emptiness. Much of this material reflects the experience of loss that Gunn (2000) believed to be inherent in Buddhist notions of emptiness. There are many transformative advantages to going through this kind of experience – for the patient and meditator alike. The old repressed and/or dissociated material (early losses and traumas) must emerge from the personal unconscious, must come to the surface – erupt into awareness – so they can be metabolized and worked through (cf. Miller 2006). In one session she remarked in a bold and somewhat curious manner: At the same time, I do think there is something beneath the emptiness, something in the emptiness . . . that is more truly me – even as I lose so much of my [old] self in this emptiness. Much of the time though, I am not . . . so sure . . . not sure about any of this. It is so strange.
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Her tentative, budding optimism was short-lived, but nonetheless she stayed with the process. Despite her uncertainty about where all this was heading, she showed remarkable courage as she sat with the void, as she moved into the blackness. No, this was not a psychotic break that my patient was experiencing, though her old defensive psychotic organization (Steiner 1993) had to be deconstructed and eventually crumble. Yes, she had been dealing with a lot of personal loss – coupled with periodic memories of pernicious trauma – but there was much more going on in these sessions. Week after week she gained more awareness of the painful material she was working through – where it came from, and how she defended against it and its untoward effects. But more was going on here. She began to realize more clearly that this was all part of a process – that this was an essential – if not the only – path to the kind of personal transformation she was seeking. Even as she was experiencing this larger sense of emptiness – encountering ‘O’ – she was simultaneously emptying herself of the repressed memories and old traumas. The old self was disintegrating, old defences were cast aside. Sometimes it was frightening for her, but she knew it was the transformative route to something more alive, more real, more true. This patient’s fortitude and determination in the face of such a daunting challenge were inspiring. I, no doubt, unwittingly conveyed to her a degree of encouragement to engage in this formidable struggle through my capacity to remain unruffled by the material. And, perhaps most importantly, through my demonstrating to her that I wasn’t in a hurry. My willingness to stay in the moment [to stay with the “bottomlessness of each moment” (Maraldo 1998: 97)] and not flinch from this sometimes frightening material – to face and encounter ‘O’ with her – seemed to further her resolve. She kept at it. At one point she asked: “Am I at the edge of being insane?” And, it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if she was determined to go to the “psychotic core” (Eigen 1986) if that would help. She seemed willing to delve into emptiness, to dive into the void, to lose self entirely – if this was what was necessary to find ‘O’ – en route to a deeper awareness of Ultimate Reality. Here is an excerpt from a session a few months later. By this time, she had been using the analytic couch regularly. There is a void. Yes, here is the void again. This void feels like a big . . . part of my life. I see it – literally – as a large, black, empty space. This void feels like a cave, it is so dark that I can’t see my hand in front of my face. What do I do? It is too scary to just feel it, or to acknowledge it, or just experience it, although that is what I . . . am inclined to do. To just feel it, to stay in this place. But . . . it feels daunting. The nature of this awareness . . . is too overwhelming, too scary. And then, a few moments later in the same session:
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I want to close it down and make it go away. I want to yell at my fear. Can you make it go away? At a point later in this same session, she wryly queried: “. . . and I pay you for this?” There is so much in this vignette to try to understand. The patient appeared to be experiencing a profound sense of panic as she encountered the darkness and emptiness first hand. But she had the courage and determination to keep at it, to stay with the process. She was hell-bent on experiencing a profound psycho-spiritual transformation. I see these as signs of psychological health. In addition, there was the patient’s obvious anger/ambivalence toward me for guiding her to these places. She learned to express it without tempering the blow, which may be a further sign of psychical health. She was furious with me much in the way that Shinzen Young (our vipassana teacher) described his profound, intermittent rage at his Roshi when things didn’t go quite as expected (Young 1997). On more than one occasion she indicated that my presence in the room enabled her to dare to be more open to inner experience. This presence made her feel safe enough to continue the work, even to yell at me, to scold me for not making it easier for her. She felt safe enough to be vulnerable. She could talk about her fear that I might abandon her at some point in the process – even as earlier abandonments were addressed. Sometimes her anguish was difficult for me to bear. But, we did it. We encountered the void together – fell into its iron grip, were worked over by its gnawing and kneading impact. I am reminded of comments made by Eigen (1998) in reference to Bion’s challenge to the analyst: Not even an analyst is used to being an analyst. Few of us are used to exercising the capacity Bion calls F [faith] in O. Bion is actually calling for an evolution of our [the analyst’s] O, [an evolution in] our capacity to be an analyst, our capacity to live F [faith] in O. To let go usual modes of being and knowing is frightening. (Eigen 1998: 77, original emphasis) Bion, of course, argued that this could be a frightening experience for both patient and analyst – as if both had to go to the edge of personal, spiritual, self-annihilation. This was one of the central challenges for me throughout this analytic treatment. Could I stay with her through the most painful parts of her struggle? Would I have faith in her process – faith in ‘O’? Could I continue to support her in whatever directions this moved in, much like the supportive sangha helps the Zen student ‘let go’ and remain open to any and all experiences that arise?
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At one point in a more recent session, she said: I realize what my job is now. I need to learn to accept uncertainty while still remaining engaged. My job is to develop a greater degree of comfort with the unexpected, with the unknown. I think I can do it, though it’s not always easy. . . . It’s easier to do with you here.
Conclusion I am indebted to this patient for letting me witness and participate in her seeking after O and sunyata-like experiences. This analytic process continues, with all its intense ups and downs, but also with the joy of her spiritual awakening. She eventually got to the place where these O-like experiences weren’t so hard for her to bear. In fact, at times she almost seemed to welcome them, more so as the analysis unfolded over time. She made it concrete for me that patients, like meditation students, need courage and determination to keep going to these deeper places. At one point, she even said: I think I am getting used to this experience of emptiness. I feel I am also coming to grips with different ways of thinking about death and life . . . about life and death. Material things matter less and less to me. None of this is especially easy, but it’s all beginning to make more and more sense. Here we see this patient letting go of worldly attachments to some degree – concomitant with her letting go of her cathexis to an old sense of self, to ego attachments, etc. This kind of letting go, of surrendering to experience (cf. Ghent 1999: 236), a practiced openness to all inner experiences, is a prerequisite for deepening the work. Courage and the ability to surrender are essential to catalyze the process of going deeper and deeper – toward that psychic reality that is beneath language – into the void, into ineffable emptiness. In this analysis there was a fundamental tension between hope and abandonment, having faith (F in O) and abandoning faith altogether. Witnessing the continuing resolution of this tension was profound, as it required the patient to take up the pure activity of absolute emptying that is true sunyata (Abe 1990: 27) – the Emptying God. She seemed to be well on her way in this direction. Also fundamental, I believe, to the process of greater self-awareness through emptying is the relationship that supports the process, be it in submission to the sangha, working with a teacher, or struggling in the consulting room. This phenomenon has become clearer and clearer. Things happen in relationship. Transformation often requires assistance, even subtle encouragement at times, but ultimately it is the caliber of the mutual engagement that catalyzes and expedites the work. We therapists and teachers often revel in supporting others as they
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go through this process – as they encounter and are transformed by these experiences – even as we encounter and are transformed by sharing their experiences. Bion frequently called for the analyst’s own improved, evolving relationship with ‘O’ to promote the analytic work [Eigen 1998: 20–77 (Bion)]. It is a shared journey – a shared journey of mutual exchange, mutual impact, and mutual respect. As the patient increases in relation to O, so does the analyst, and vice versa. As the analyst learns to surrender to O, and the bottomlessness of each moment, so does the patient. It is the interplay of these kinds of dynamics – in just such a relational context – that permits the journey to broaden and deepen. And it is the neutral yet supportive holding environment that enables one to surrender : to surrender to the emptying place, and perhaps to dwell in that emptying place.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dale Mathers, Loren H. Miller, and Alan N. West for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.
References Abe, M. (1990) ‘Kenotic god and dynamic sunyata,’ pp. 3–65 in J. B. Cobb and C. Ives (eds) The Emptying God: A Buddhist–Jewish–Christian Conversation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Abe, M. (1998) ‘The Self in Jung and Zen,’ pp. 276–289 in A. Molino (ed.) The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, New York: North Point Press. Austin, J. H. (1998) Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness, Boston, MA: MIT Press. Bion, W. R. (1965) Transformations, London: William Heinemann. (New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.) —— (1970) Attention and Interpretation, London: Tavistock Publications (New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.) Borowitz, E. B. (1990) ‘Dynamic sunyata and the god whose glory fills the universe,’ pp. 79–90 in J. B. Cobb and C. Ives (eds) The Emptying God: A Buddhist–Jewish– Christian Conversation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Cobb, J. B. and Ives, C. (eds) (1990) The Emptying God: A Buddhist–Jewish–Christian Conversation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Eigen, M. (1986) The Psychotic Core, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. —— (1998) The Psychoanalytic Mystic, New York: Free Association Books. Freud, S. (1920) ‘Beyond the pleasure principle,’ pp. 594–626 in P. Gay (ed.) The Freud Reader (1989) New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Garfield, J. L. (trans.) (1995) The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghent, E. (1999) ‘Masochism, submission, surrender: masochism as a perversion of surrender,’ pp. 211–242 in S. A. Mitchell and L. Aron (eds) Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition, Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
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Gunn, R. J. (2000) Journeys into Emptiness: Do ¯ gen, Merton, Jung and the Quest for Transformation, New York: Paulist Press. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time (original 1927), trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row. Heraclitus (2001) Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans. B. Haxton, New York: Viking. Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Norton. —— (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A. Sheridan ed. J.-A. Miller, New York: Norton. Maraldo, J. C. (1998) ‘Emptiness, history, accountability: a critical examination of Nishitani Keiji’s standpoint,’ Zen Buddhism Today: Annual Report of the Kyoto Zen Symposium, 15, 97–117. Miller, M. E. (2002) ‘Zen and psychotherapy: from neutrality, through relationship, to the emptying place,’ pp. 81–92 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, London: BrunnerRoutledge. —— (2006) ‘Adult development, learning, and insight through psychotherapy: the cultivation of change and transformation,’ pp. 219–239 in C. Hoare (ed.) Handbook of Adult Development and Learning, New York: Oxford University Press. Milner, M. (1987) The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Payne, R. K. (2002) ‘Locating Buddhism, locating psychology,’ pp. 172–186 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, London: Brunner-Routledge. Roberts, B. (1982) The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey, Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications. —— (1989) What is Self? A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness, Austin, TX: Mary Botsford Goens. —— (1991) The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Starr, M. (2002) Dark Night of the Soul, by St John of the Cross, trans. and introduced by M. Starr, New York: Riverhead Books. Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic, and Borderline Patients, London: Routledge. Thurman, R. (1991) Central Philosophy of Tibet, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tillich, P. (1959) Theology of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Van Bragt, J. (1998) ‘Nishitani revisited,’ Zen Buddhism Today: Annual Report of the Kyoto Zen Symposium, 15, 77–95 Young, S. (1997) The Science of Enlightenment, Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Chapter 10
Empty rowboats No-blame and other therapeutic effects of no-self in long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis Polly Young-Eisendrath
In Buddhist practice, we learn that the self is as empty of essence as the sound of a bell. Such insights from Buddhist theories of subjectivity bring important contributions to a relational (two-person) paradigm for therapeutic change. In this short chapter, I argue that embracing the Buddhist notion of no-self yields new ways of looking at our therapeutic endeavor to transform human suffering within a relationship. In my view, we can discern two broad perspectives from which fundamental assumptions are made about the aims of analytic therapy: the ‘self orientation’ and the ‘no-self orientation.’ A contemporary self orientation is nicely captured by psychoanalyst Frank Summers: the articulation of the self is the fulfillment of one’s destiny. When important potential components of the self remain unrealized, the path of life is not one’s destiny, but fate, an imposition from without. . . . We might say that the unconscious as potential consists of unrealized destiny. (2005: 31) Theories of object relations from Winnicott, Bollas, Modell, and Jung, among others, have conceptualized psychopathology as arrested development of the self. The unconscious is assumed, then, to include some kind of blueprint for the future, as well as complexes linking it to the past. In this approach, a central goal of treatment is to unblock, uncover, or recover the self or the true self, which restores creativity and vibrance. The no-self approach, which I emphasize in this chapter, embraces nothing like a blueprint of a true self. In place of such a teleology is a focus on mutual discovery within a safe therapeutic environment. The suffering, symptoms, or anguish of the patient opens the way to therapeutic inquiry. In the process of inquiry, the patient and therapist inevitably collide with obstacles and relational dilemmas in which they can observe how the self is disrupted and re-established. If the therapist has cultivated skills and methods for making use of such no-self occurrences, they open up a profound appreciation for interdependence and a confidence rooted in something other than the ego.
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These therapeutic skills include mindful awareness of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, a deep belief in mutual discovery (as a complement to individual insight), a willingness to engage honestly with uncertainty or not-knowing, and a sense of humour. Occasions of witnessing no-self in a psychotherapy or analysis open the door to therapist and patient honing these skills, but no-self has been a difficult phenomenon to describe.
The empty rowboat and a Zen koan And so, I want to draw first on a Zen parable that may help me convey a felt sense of a central therapeutic effect of no-self. I tell the parable in my own words. Please try to picture yourself crossing a lake in a rowboat, rowing hard with a goal in mind – perhaps to have lunch with a friend on the far side of the lake. As your boat closes in on the distant shore, suddenly, Bang! Crunch! Your boat collides with another boat! You spin around in irritation to confront the careless oaf who has broadsided you. Turning, you see that the colliding boat is empty! You sigh a great relief. There is no one to blame. This relief of no-blame has a fundamental therapeutic effect when fully embraced. Opening ourselves to its vastness – and its accompanying restful ease – is a most difficult matter, however. As Buddhism teaches, it is our nature to be perpetually dissatisfied, even annoyed and irritated, that the world, others, and the circumstances of our lives frequently do not go as we need or want them to. When that happens, we want to blame someone, ourselves or another. Occasionally, we may discover there is no one to blame. This discovery brings a unique ease with ourselves, others, and even our predicaments – the gold standard of ‘acceptance,’ as far as I can tell. The rowboat story gives a palpable sense of this acceptance of what’s shocking or unwanted, but it focuses on a single individual. And so, I want to offer another story to help us contact the relational dynamics of no-self. This is a fairly well-known Zen koan about an old woman. The old woman of Zen story often symbolizes a wisdom figure who, because she is marginalized in the social order, must resort to unique means to teach her valuable insights. In this koan, an old woman has, for 20 years, been supporting a head monk by sending him food (through her servant girls) and providing him the means to lodge at a hermitage. After all this time, she decides one day to test his spiritual acuity. And so, she instructs her beautiful 16-year-old servant girl to walk through the door of the monk’s meditation hut and embrace him when she next delivers his food. In the midst of the embrace, the girl is to ask him, “How do you feel this very moment?” The girl does exactly as she is told. The monk immediately steps back from her embrace and replies, “I feel like an old withered tree during the three coldest months of the winter, leaning against the rocks with no warmth.” When the girl returns to her mistress and recites the monk’s short poem, the old woman exclaims, “This monk is worthless! He’s attained nothing! For 20 years I have been feeding and housing him and
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he does not even tell the truth!” She then goes straight to his hermitage, puts him out, and burns the place down. What is the meaning of the old woman’s actions? What was wrong with the monk’s response? What would you do if, after twenty years of celibate practice, a very attractive person unexpectedly gave you a surprisingly warm embrace? Experienced psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have all faced such moments when our patients passionately express their erotic desire, devastating critique, rage, or threats. For instance, I have had patients who have said “I am in love with you. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. I think about you all the time and I can’t get excited anymore about being with anyone else.” If I were (mistakenly) to interpret this desire as “transference,” I would be sure to draw a response from my patient like the old woman’s (she’d be furious). If the 16-year-old servant girl had been the patient of the monk, she would have felt dismissed and rejected by his poetic response to her embrace. Had he accepted the embrace, however, she would have felt taken advantage of. The koan presents us with a relational dilemma demanding an engagement outside of our old habits and defences. When the no-self enters a therapeutic relationship without knocking, we must have access to our fundamental humanity and honesty or we will alienate ourselves from our own deepest source, not to mention the patient.
The impossibility of my topic Like the old monk, I face a danger in writing this. I am trying to convey the nature of the self and the no-self in words, knowing it is an almost-impossible task. You may believe the self is easy to define, but if you ask ten people how they define it, I wager you would get as many definitions. As the Buddha taught, when we look for evidence of the self, we can’t readily find any. We cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or cognize it clearly. Even psychoanalysts, who have spent decades writing about it, can never agree on how to define the self. While the self may be hard to define, the no-self is considered impossible (even spiritually dangerous) to define. Indeed, Buddhist scholars and Zen teachers admonish us not to conceptualize no-self. The well-known Buddhist scholar and professor, Masao Abe-Sensei (Molino 1998: 186), says, “No-self represents nothing but the true nature or true Self of humanity which cannot be conceptualized at all and is beyond self and no-self.” Repeatedly, when Zen students attempt any verbal reply to a question about no-self, they are dismissed or humiliated by their teacher. Richard Payne, another Buddhist scholar and professor of religious studies, lays bare the problem when he says, “There is no such thing as emptiness which may itself be experienced. One cannot experience an absence of something” (Young-Eisendrath and Muramoto 2002: 183). Payne, who subtly disagrees with Abe’s humanistic definition of no-self as the true self of humanity,
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draws on the great Buddhist patriarch and philosopher, Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika School that specializes in the epistemology of emptiness. Performing an exhaustive logical analysis of the subject, Nagarjuna concludes: “a nonempty thing does not exist” (Garfield 1995: 69). About this conclusion, Payne comments: It is in its rejection of essences that Buddhism makes a radical break from the rest of the religious culture of India, and continues to offer a radical challenge to our own conceptions of the world. Despite much confusion about the matter, emptiness of the self does not refer to non-existence of the personality, but rather to the absence of any essence from each and every thing that exists. In other words, it means exactly the same thing as the teachings of impermanence and interdependence. (Young-Eisendrath and Muramoto 2002: 182) As all Buddhist teachers insist, to speak about the ‘experience’ of emptiness threatens to reify emptiness. Consequently, the Madhyamika School insists that emptiness is also empty. And yet, if it were entirely impossible to speak or write about no-self, we would not believe – as I do – that we could bring its wisdom to therapeutic practices.
Self and no-self Because it is my aim to describe the function of no-self in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, I will begin with the self, as Nagarjuna would recommend. Keep in mind that no-self is the absence of self. Please note that I bring to these remarks, spiritually dangerous as they may be, decades of practice and study of Buddhism, having initially taken the Zen Precepts in 1971; and decades of practice and study of psychotherapy and psychology, having finished my doctorate in psychology in 1980; and of psychoanalysis, having finished my training to be a Jungian analyst in 1986. To begin, I regard the human self as an action. The self is not something we are, but something we do: unifying our subjectivity in space and time, and separating ourselves out from the flow of experience. Mostly, we do this unconsciously in micro-movements of our perceptions, creating a sense impression that we are ‘in here’ while something else is ‘out there.’ We are not born with this function fully developed, but rather with an inherent potential – an archetype – to develop it in relationship to others. Beginning around the age of 18 months, when the self-conscious emotions (that cause us to compare and separate ourselves from others and our environment) emerge in the human infant, the infant comes to master the distinction between in-here and out-there. The nascent human ego announces itself with new demands for protecting the experience of being separate. The two-year-old shouts “me!,” “mine!,” and “no!” to signal that something new
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is happening. From this beginning, we eventually develop and organize a complex of affective images, ideas, and body sensations which take on a personal, gendered identity, and a life story over time. Our ability to sustain an embodied sense of being an individual subject depends on many brain and body states, as well as relational supports, language, and society. We develop all of our habits of self in relation to others. When we think, act, and feel ourselves as continuous, separate subjects, without a specific consciousness of doing so, we are generating the self automatically and unselfconsciously, like driving a car without noticing we’re doing it. When we are conscious of ourselves, especially when we feel selfconscious – in times of shame, envy, pride, guilt, embarrassment, and jealousy – we protect or reify our separateness and its identity. At such moments, we are drawn away from whatever else is taking place and into our self-conscious reactions. From decades of research on ‘flow experience,’ conducted by Csikszentmihalyi (e.g. 1991, 1997, 2000) and his associates, we know self-consciousness interrupts high concentration and equanimity. High concentration and equanimity, called ‘flow’ or ‘optimal experience’ by Csikszentmihalyi, produces more positive feelings than self-consciousness. In flow states, found in such activities as love-making, rock-climbing, chess-playing, and meditating (among others), we may encounter an empty rowboat of no-self. Recent comprehensive research on mindfulness training, conducted under the auspices of the Mind and Life Institute and the Dalai Lama, has also shown that positive emotions accompany intentionally cultivated no-self states. Sometimes, though, we have a most negative encounter with no-self states. When we shockingly lose our self function, while completely awake, we are likely to feel terrified, confused, or overwhelmed with anxiety. Losing our sense of time, our containment in the body, our ability to act for ourselves, and/or our feeling of being separate from others, can undermine our personhood. Words like ‘de-realization’ and ‘depersonalization’ mark these episodes as pathological. In order to distinguish these disruptive, pathological states from intentionally cultivated meditational states, and from empty rowboats discovered during flow, I refer to these jarring disruptions as ‘non-self ’ states. Non-self states are often the unwanted consequences of sudden massive trauma or continuous relational trauma. In this discussion, I have implicitly drawn on two Jungian concepts – archetype and complex. I want to take a moment to define them. In my usage, archetype means a built-in universal imperative to organize images (that give form to our fantasies and also become invisible lenses through which we ‘see’ the world) during emotionally aroused states. Archetypal images are highly motivating, recur repeatedly in arousal states, and tend to trigger limbic system fight-or-flight reactivity when they grip our awareness. The theory of the psychic primacy of affectively driven images, and their patterned states of awareness and motivation, originates with Jung though it has been recently
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‘discovered again’ by linguists Lakoff and Johnson (e.g. Lakoff 1990; Lakoff and Johnson 1999), who have done extensive scientific research on the metaphorical underpinnings of language and thought. In his book on imagination and the meaningful brain, psychoanalyst Arnold Modell (2003) gives a detailed account of the neuroscience of metaphorical images and their importance to human meaning. Archetypal potentials unfold and evolve over a lifetime, in unconscious or semi-conscious affectively driven image clusters. Jung’s term for these clusters is psychological complexes. Laden with non-verbal meanings and feelings, complexes are the underlying structures of the human personality. They cannot be entirely captured by verbal analysis, nor can they be defeated by the will or the wish to ignore them. When a complex is activated it grips our perceptual awareness. Each complex has both a subject and an object pole. For instance, a particular idealized father complex might include both a charming, seductive father and a needy child – as affectively driven dynamics. In adult life either pole can be projected and the other identified with. When aroused in relationship, a complex produces an unintentional attempt to communicate unconscious emotional meanings through perceiving their frightening or stimulating implications in another’s words or actions. This kind of projection tends to invite an enactment of what is projected. The recipient of the projection feels emotionally kidnapped by, and may identify with, what is projected by the sender. If the recipient plays out the projected dynamic, he or she will become an actor in the other’s inner theater. For instance, the patient who passionately claims “I’m in love with you, that’s just the way it is” opens the door to my playing the dismissive or seductive parent. If I were to enact either, I would star in the role of someone who already trivialized or abused the patient, disastrously repeating the trauma. The cornerstone of a human personality is the ego complex which, as I said above, comes into being at around 18 months. At its core is the archetype of self – with its imperative to create and sustain the experience and image of individual subjectivity. In each of us, the archetypal self develops in the context of relationship and culture to become a collection of personal identities, sensations, and feelings we consider to be ‘me.’ And, yes, the ego complex also contains an object pole, the potential for projecting dissociated not-me states. Jung called these the ‘shadow’ of the ego. Over a lifetime, the archetype of self continues to motivate habits of, and interest in, self-consciousness, self-awareness, self-recognition, responsibility, and self-reflection. While the archetype of self pulls us toward an experience of separateness and unity as a subject, other complexes pull us away into discontinuity and dissociation. We never achieve mastery of the personality which is, by nature, difficult to manage and full of conflicting motivations. Our fundamental freedom is, however, the possibility of becoming aware of (and responsible for) the conflicted motivations and images that we are. Certainly, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are designed to increase our
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self-knowledge and self-acceptance. An openness to no-blame, and an ability to respond mindfully when emotionally triggered, are invaluable skills. And that is why I believe that no-self plays an important part in the therapeutic endeavor. In relation to the individual subject, no-self refers to the absence of the boundaries of subjectivity at the level of the archetypal self (coherence, continuity, agency, and attachment), but it presumes mindful awareness. To understand this, we have to distinguish between person and self. ‘Person’ here means a body-mind being in a public domain. ‘Self ’ is a function or action of a person. In the absence of doing a self, a person encounters no-self, if that person is mindfully aware and alert. Mindful perceptions of no-self are cultivated in many different ways in Buddhist practices; helping people attend to the absence of lacks, gaps, inside–outside. In such moments the knower–known or observer–observed are one. Buddhism encourages us to become familiar with no-self phenomena and to study them – not to make them separate or holy, but to see what they teach us. These practices are skilful only when they produce greater compassion and wisdom, not special feelings of spiritual achievement. Anatta – the Sanskrit term meaning the absence of essence in all things – refers to the interbeing aspect of reality. Everything (including us) and every moment are dependent on circumstances. Because of our strong tendencies to create a separate self (and sustain it through an ego complex), we have difficulties in perceiving Anatta. Buddhist ethical and meditational practices which focus our attention on no-self are designed also to show us exactly when and how we create and sustain a self. Mindful awareness of how we do this will ultimately allow us to walk around and relate to others without habitually doing it. This gives us more freedom and options when in contact with others and allows taking responsibility for our actions without too much self-consciousness. We are no longer driven by our ego complex or constantly tripped up by negative (or positive) self-concern. Due to space limitations, it is impossible here for me to give a clinical illustration of a therapeutic no-self moment. Such moments often occur as empty rowboats of no-blame – recognizing the universe (ourselves within it) is, from a certain view, impossibly entangled when it comes to placing blame (especially in regard to complexes which have been generations in the making). Other no-self moments arise when something unintentionally impinges on the therapeutic frame (for example, the patient is locked out, a letter doesn’t arrive, the electricity goes out, the patient unintentionally hears gossip about the therapist). Our encounter is disrupted, no one is to blame, but we need each other in order to make sense of the event and to move forward. As in the koan about the old woman burning down the hermitage, these therapeutic disturbances often test our mettle – and our ability to use the skills of mindful awareness, mutual discovery, honesty in the face of uncertainty, and a sense of
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humour. In such moments, we are profoundly aware of our interdependence and interbeing – our no-self. Ultimately, no-self moments in psychotherapy, when used effectively to witness interbeing, produce a transformative awareness that the ‘other’ is not an ‘object’ against which the ‘self ’ is constituted, but is rather a partner in mutual discovery. Indeed, the deepest therapeutic effects of no-self produce a joyful awareness of the two therapeutic partners as empty rowboats, floating on a sea of ordinary humanity that is full of surprises.
References Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper Perennial. —— (1997) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Perennial. —— (2000) Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Garfield, J. (trans.) (1995) The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadyamakakarika, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. (1990) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: HarperCollins. Modell, A. (2003) Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Molino, A. (ed.) (1998) The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, New York: North Point Press. Summers, F. (2005) Self Creation: Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Art of the Possible, New York: Analytic Press. Young-Eisendrath, P. and Muramoto, S. (2002) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, London: Routledge.
Chapter 11
Anxiety, struggle, and egoic process Bruce C . Tift
Many of us sense that much of the pain in our lives is somehow self-created. In response to this intuition, we seek help. Buddhism and psychotherapy both offer well-developed theories and a wide range of techniques and practices designed to relieve unnecessary suffering. And both approaches deal with the core issues of anxiety and struggle, and their relationship to egoic process. The experience of anxiety is basically that of a threat to oneself. There are intense physical sensations which energize us, a more focused attention in which we search for the danger, and usually a sense of ‘an imminent catastrophe.’ We all seem to carry a biologically based instinct to avoid anxiety when possible and to make it go away as quickly as possible if forced to feel it. As humans, however, our experiencing is not only on the biological level but also on the emotional, cognitive, and spiritual levels. And, in an unexamined way, we often react to the anxiety of disturbance on these levels as if our literal survival were at risk. Most of us, in fact, organize our experiencing to a significant extent around the avoidance of certain energies which are associated with intense levels of anxiety. The psychotherapeutic approach to anxiety is basically developmental. In the first years of life, we are subjected to intense emotions and sensations which we are not capable of processing, or ‘metabolizing,’ and which threaten to overwhelm our fragile sense of self and thus provoke intense anxiety. We construct defenses that reduce this anxiety through a disconnection from, a repression of, these disturbing energies. This sacrifice of a part of ourselves allows our more conscious sense of self to operate relatively free of anxiety, but with the cost of a fundamental sense of being divided against oneself. We create, as character structure, a positive ‘self ’ or ego associated with the ability to function and survive, and a negative ‘not-self ’ associated with energies which threaten this ability. This effort to avoid anxiety is the activity of our health and intelligence, but by organizing around the avoidance of intense feelings such as grief, rage, and fear, we paradoxically place these worst fears at the center of our sense of self. This is turn generates chronic, though largely unconscious, anxiety and paranoia, a distrust in oneself, a sense of ‘basic flaw,’ and many of the issues commonly worked with in psychotherapy.
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The Buddhist approach to anxiety could be understood as an assertion that it is how we relate to reality, rather than reality itself, that gives rise to unnecessary suffering. Because we relate to the vivid experience of a ‘self ’ as evidence of some separate essential nature, we naturally try to continually protect and improve this self. This is the egoic process – the process through which we generate and maintain an experience of a solid, continuous, significant, and personal ‘self.’ Unfortunately, this project of self-hood is never successful. Examining our experience carefully, we find a display that is always changing, suffering that we can’t make go away, and an inability to ever grasp or know this apparent self. The inevitable consequence of our identifying with a ‘self ’ is a pervasive and chronic anxiety, as our efforts to feel safe and comfortable are constantly undermined by the evidence of our actual experiencing. Anxiety can be understood, then, as the accurate perception of the basically open nature of life, of mind, but from the reference point of egoic process. Anxiety can be seen as an approximation of the experience of open mind, but with the distortion of avoidance because open awareness provides no support for the experience of a solid self. Increasing conscious participation in open awareness, then, may require increasing our conscious participation in our experience of anxiety. From either point of view, we are left with a dilemma. Our efforts to avoid the truth of our experiencing result in chronic anxiety. We unconsciously manifest a variety of ‘symptoms’ which appear to contain and explain this anxiety. We seek relief from these symptoms, but if we were to successfully resolve these problems we would lose the distractive functions they provide and possibly have to examine the root causes of our anxiety. From a therapeutic view, we would then be faced with our worst fears, our core emotional vulnerability. From a Buddhist view, we would be faced with our raw, immediate experiencing, which provides no support for egoic process. Our dilemma, then, is we either avoid the truth of our experiencing and have the intense disturbance of chronic anxiety, or commit to the truth of our experiencing and have the intense disturbance of emotional vulnerability and of no support for personal identity. Until we train ourselves to rest in the experience of anxiety and disturbance as completely legitimate and valid parts of life, we unconsciously look for some way out, some formula, or at least some reliable distraction. A fundamental response to this dilemma is the creation of polarized life dramas. We represent the truth of our disturbance as a fear and the truth of our wish to end our disturbance and have a life of safety and comfort as a hope. Adding the fantasy of ‘resolution’ to these contradictory and apparently mutually exclusive experiences then binds or captures our attention within this drama. And because of the anxiety associated with our fears, we usually have a vague sense that the resolution of this drama is of survivallevel importance, that the outcome will determine our worth as a person or the viability of our lives. At this point we have created an incredibly resilient and stable psychic structure: struggle.
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Struggle has been defined as a continued effort to resist force or to free oneself from constraints. The core struggle for most of us is that we want things to be different than they are – we don’t want fear and intense negative emotions; we don’t want to become sick and to die; we don’t want the incomprehensible violence in the world to continue; and so on. Neurotic struggle, then, could be understood as a continued effort to resist reality or to free oneself from its constraints. To be most effective, a strategy of resisting reality will operate at a basically unconscious level, will adequately incorporate our actual experiencing without directly working with it, and will be self-perpetuating. This is the elegance of struggle. Although we believe we want to resolve our struggles, our unconscious investment is actually to guarantee their continuity in order to maintain the avoidant functions they serve. By acknowledging the actual existence of our disowned energies, but in the unworkable version of dangerous and overwhelming fear, we can believe we’re really dealing with reality but are just not yet ready to go too deep. And our refusal to acknowledge reality creates the experience of alienation and disconnection, which generates chronic anxiety, which provides a continuing sense of imminent threat, which activates our distrust of ourselves and of life, which then justifies our various styles of not being open to reality, which then generates alienation, and so on. Struggle operates on three distinct levels: content, process, and basic. All three levels operate simultaneously, though one’s energetic ‘center of gravity’ tends to progress from content to process to basic when one has committed to some path of waking up. This progression could also be understood as a movement from disowning energies, to owning energies, to experiencing energies while neither disowning nor owning. The content level of struggle concerns specific fears and disturbances. It is about improving the story of one’s life, about successfully eliminating the problems which seem to threaten us. In the therapeutic view, it is about preneurotic experiencing, where one’s task is to develop the skills and structures which allow us to feel adequately functional as an intact self. In the Buddhist view, the content level can be seen as working with Nirmanakaya experiencing, with the story of what we are trying to possess, avoid, or ignore. In both views, the goal of relating directly to open awareness is seen as a possible future achievement. Because one’s self is seen as basically problematic, a continuing struggle to eliminate problems, heal wounds, dissolve obstacles, and feel good about oneself is accepted without examination. The process level of struggle concerns the experiential atmosphere created by the splitting off of conscious from unconscious, mind from body, which leads to a pervasive sense of discomfort not associated with any specific content issue. At this level, enough confidence has been gained that one takes on the project of recovering experiential ownership of that which has been disowned. Having developed the sense of being an adequately intact self, one can now risk relating to ‘other.’ This is the realm of most depth
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therapies, where the basic intention is to make conscious that which has been unconscious. In the Buddhist view, this level can be seen as working with Sambhogakaya experiencing, with the tendency to subtly define and orient oneself based on emotional energy, to confirm one’s existence based on our experience of ‘other.’ Although in both views there is an increasing sense of confidence, there usually remains an identification with one’s conscious experiencing and a subtle investment in the project of improvement, in the struggle to be more fully alive, more embodied, more present, more wakeful. The basic level of struggle concerns the way in which the form-level display of our experiencing is unconsciously used as a distraction from the nature of open mind. This level is usually not addressed by mainstream therapies. Because of the largely unquestioned belief in a separate self, psychotherapy is of course organized around the effort to improve one’s experience of this self. In the Buddhist view, this question of how the relative experience of form and limitation is related to the absolute experience of open mind and freedom can be seen as working with Dharmakaya experiencing. The continual referencing of our experience to ourselves, rather than to the immediate open environment of awareness, is actually the unconscious practice with which we generate the fantasy of a significant and solid self. And the type of selfreferencing which seems to be most effective in this effort is that of struggle. By maintaining a sense of dilemma, an urgent need to resolve what can’t be resolved, with a vague feeling that the outcome of this struggle is of survivallevel significance, we guarantee a type of hyper vigilance and fascination with the content of our experiencing. This ritualized struggle is so effective, resilient, and adaptive to endlessly changing life circumstances that from a Buddhist view, on a relative level, ‘ego’ is sometimes considered to be synonymous with struggle. The probably unresolvable dialogue between psychotherapeutic and Buddhist views has already been quite productive on the content and process levels, but little has been addressed on the basic level. Working in either the therapeutic or Buddhist way at this level involves the same intention: to relax struggle. Relaxing struggle dissolves the apparently significant dramas of resolution we create around contradictory, dualistically perceived energies. As we gradually allow our various hopes and fears to coexist simultaneously, we find there is in fact no resolution necessary or even possible. Experiencing the immediate reality of our worst fears doesn’t kill us, while experiencing the immediate reality of our greatest hopes doesn’t save us. Both are only transient energies which arise, dwell, and fall away. Being equally willing to consciously participate in either negative or positive feelings, we begin to cultivate an attitude of non-bias. Without the stabilized contraction of attention creating a stabilized sense of self, we find that not knowing who we are does not make us dysfunctional, but instead gives rise to the experiences of freedom, unconditional confidence, and open-heartedness.
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Within the path of therapy the central project is self-improvement, so relaxing struggle involves a variety of skillful means which make it increasingly difficult to invest in this agenda. Making struggle ‘wrong’ will obviously be easily incorporated into a further, more subtle struggle. Therefore, the primary intervention is to invite more and more awareness to what is already being done and the function this may serve, with no agenda of change. There is no sense that one’s neurosis is wrong. Instead, it is seen as the activity of intelligence. There is no sense that one is somehow in an underdeveloped state. Developmentally, how we organize our experience may be our best effort to take care of ourselves, but in a way that’s based on what used to be accurate and is now probably several decades out of date. In the present moment, it may be our attempt to not bring into awareness a type of experiential intensity we fear will annihilate us. In either case, bringing awareness to the truth of our experiencing allows us to examine the basic fantasy that life is somehow fundamentally problematic. Working in this way tends to be generic rather than symptom-specific. We return, over and over, to the embodied immediacy of our experiencing and find out at each moment if anything is actually dangerous, or missing, or unworkable. Within the path of Buddhism, most practitioners begin with an intuition that their sense of ‘self ’ is the source of unnecessary suffering. A common response, therefore, is the effort to achieve a state of ‘no-self,’ as if this state would relieve us of our basic human concerns. The potential problem is that this can become a more ‘spiritual’ version of stabilized struggle. One can become addicted to the path aspect of Buddhism, where ‘self ’ is bad, and ‘no-self ’ is good, and a fantasy of resolution fuels a continual drama of one’s worth. Relaxing struggle at the basic level, though, is at the heart of many teachings and techniques. In Zen koan practice, for example, it seems that the egoic process of struggle is intentionally exaggerated and intensified till the fantasy of resolution explodes in futility. The basic practices of mindfullness, with the mind aspect of clarity and the heart aspect of kindness-toall-that-arises, block the interpretation and judgement of experiencing which is essential to struggle. And the fundamental discipline of embodied immediacy dissolves the dissociation necessary to the claim that our experience is somehow unworkable. Perhaps the most simple approach is that of directing one’s attention to the nature of awareness itself, to that which is aware of and inseparable from the endless display of mind, including the drama of struggle. As struggle is relaxed, we find that the discriminating activity of mind does not stop. Over time, though, we may recognize that the form level of our experience is inseparable from the formless awareness within which that form arises. Just as there is no resolution to the relative display of ‘self ’ and the absolute ground of unconditioned mind which provides no support for a solid self, there need be no resolution to the apparent contradiction of
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working to improve one’s experience of self and of not believing that this work is of some essential significance. Rather than thinking we must choose sides, we can be guided by the activity of compassion, by the effort to relieve unnecessary suffering. This is an intention that is at the heart of both psychotherapy and Buddhism.
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Part V
Psychotherapy practice
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Chapter 12
Polarity processing Self/No-Self, the Transcendent Function, and wholeness Deon van Zyl
In what I regard as one of the most revealing paragraphs from Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, he compares the alchemical operation with the psychological process of active imagination, and says that in giving your special attention, concentration, and observation to any manifestation from the unconscious (like a spontaneous fantasy, a dream, an irrational mood or affect), you will see that it already has “everything it needs” within itself (CW 14: para 749). Ken Holmes, in his translation and commentary of Bodhisattva Maitreya’s teaching on the Buddha Nature, says: “As soon as one truthfully investigates the nature of any one thing, one discovers the presence of everything” (Holmes and Holmes 1999: 28). With special attention, exploration, and mindfulness, one will see that both personal issues (the problems or experiences I have) and universal or fundamental issues (who I am, who we are, and the dynamics of humankind and life in general), are contained in every experience, conscious or unconscious. This is the central thesis of this chapter, that every experience, deeply explored, contains everyday conventional aspects as well as absolute truths. All is contained in every experience. When we encounter the fundamental issue or absolute truth of the experience though, we see that it can only be described in paradoxical unities between opposing polarities. Paradox becomes the only way to express the essence of the experience. According to Jung, this is why the alchemists were so fond of paradoxes. Let’s look at the experience of pain as an example.
Paradoxes and polarities of pain and suffering Pain as a personal experience, in what Buddhist teaching would call its conventional truth, feels like just one thing: a hurtful and unpleasant sensation. If we look into its fundamental or absolute truth, we see its selfcontradictions, its paradoxical nature. In the paradoxical experience of pain, the temperate balance between the polarities of boundary and penetration is thrown off center through excessive emphasis on one or the other side. A harmonious dialectic of opposites (boundary and penetration), a temperate
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‘middle way’ (to borrow from Tantric and Mahayana Buddhism), is thrown out of balance or off-center. This is in line with the definition of the Sanskrit term ‘dukkha’ (Young-Eisendrath 2002: 72). This painful unbalance is because of attachment, fixation, and rigid one-sidedness. In pain, one side of the boundary–penetration polarity is amplified while the other side is minimized. Fixation on forging a boundary minimizes penetration, with ensuing painful restriction. On the other hand, an overemphasis of penetration denies boundary, with some form of painful invasion as a result. Buddha ascribed suffering to resisting interwovenness through clinging to one thing and rejecting another. Through this attachment our openness gets lost and we create suffering (Heynekamp 2002). Jung quotes Chuang-tzu who remarks that “Tao is obscured when you fix your eye on little segments of existence only . . . [leading to] one-sided attachments” (CW 8: para 923). One-sided attachment doesn’t make the other side disappear. It causes what Jung calls a “counter movement” (CW 14: para 603). In this way it becomes excessive in its own right. Some form of invasion is always inherent in excessive restriction, and restriction is part and parcel of excessive invasion. A metastatic cancer cell penetrates and destroys boundaries as much as it limits and enforces boundaries. An autocratic manager who peers over your shoulder at work is simultaneously invasive and restrictive. The apartheid system in South Africa before 1994 made the forging of boundaries its policy, but took grossly invasive liberties with people’s boundaries in the process. This interdependent dynamic of the opposites in pain, takes us to another aspect of its fundamental truth, the unity between the opposite poles. Boundary relates to penetration as Lao-tzu’s “high stands on low,” Jung called this an “. . . indisputable truth . . .” (CW 9 i: para 603). One side of the polarity owes its existence, by definition, to the other. Without a boundary limit there is no penetration, because there is nothing to penetrate. Without penetration there is no boundary, because there is nothing to contain. This oneness or unity between opposites is aptly described in Buddhist thinking. Opposites are seen as dependently co-arising or co-originating, and therefore in essence void or empty of their own identity (Sanskrit – shunya). The Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna said: “Whoever sees Interdependent Origination can see Emptiness” (Kawai 2002: 144). Each opposite is a foundation for the other, they seed each other. As Jung said in his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (1916: 4), the pairs of opposites are ‘not,’ because each balances the other. Words fail a description of this ‘not,’ the Void. In Buddhist terms it is described as “Formless Self ” (Okano 2002: 233) or “No-Self ” (Mathers 2002: 221), and from a Jungian perspective as ‘Self.’ Jung preferred the terms ‘wholeness’ and ‘unity’ rather than emptiness for ‘Self,’ but the association with the indescribable void is clear when he uses terms like: “The self is the total, timeless man . . . unknowable and incomprehensible” (CW 16: para 531 and 532), “. . . the indescribable and super-empirical totality” (CW 14: para
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765). If we remember Jung’s understanding of the term ‘unconscious’ includes the collective as well, then the Self ’s absolute nature is also seen in the following quotation: “The self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious” (CW 12: para 44). In a 1955 letter, Jung did associate this unknowable Self with an “empty centre,” but stated clearly that this emptiness does not mean “absence” or “vacancy,” but “. . . something unknowable that is endorsed with the highest intensity” (in Adler 1976: 258–259). One can constellate the Buddhist Void/No-Self or the Jungian Self simultaneously at the centre and the circumference of any polarity. In pain, the Buddhist Void/No-Self or the Jungian Self is between and all around the polarities of boundary and penetration, restriction and invasion. It is the emptiness of the interdependence of enforcement and penetration of boundary. The No-Self is the void of the opposites, originating dependently from each other. The experience of pain remains real in its personal or conventional aspect, but in its fundamental truth one can awaken to its voidness through its paradoxical polarities. The voidness is not blankness but wisdom (Holmes and Holmes 1999). It is a profound understanding, a way of perceiving, not an elimination of experience in all its contrasts. This is most probably why the Buddha referred to himself as the ‘awakened one,’ experiencing the opposites but seeing through their interdependence, the emptiness of their separate identities. The Self (Jungian) is awareness of interrelatedness, understanding wholeness, and experiencing the paradoxical unity of opposites. “The self . . . is absolutely paradoxical in that it represents in every respect thesis and antithesis, and at the same time synthesis” (CW 12: para 22). The synthesis, wholeness or ‘emptiness of a separate identity’ (voidness) which Jung called ‘Self,’ the Buddhists call ‘No-Self,’ and this is present in the fundamental dynamics of pain, and every other experience. When we open up the experience of pain, and look into its fundamental nature, we see that pain is the extreme expression of, and call to, a polarity. In turn, the polarity is the expression of, and call to, the No-Self Void or the Jungian Self. It is quite clear why Buddha said that if we know and understand suffering, there is nothing more to understand (Rinpoche 1992). All is in every experience, even in pain.
Therapeutic approaches As a Western psychotherapist, I cannot possibly understand the subtleties of many levels of Buddhist enlightenment, nor the depth or intensity of unbounded compassion, bliss, rapture, serenity, equanimity, or the highest samadhi. I can at most say that every now and then my patients and I experience what Munindra calls “a little bit of enlightenment” (Engler 2003: 41). I mainly utilize what Jung calls the “synthetic” or “constructive” method
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and the mechanism of the “transcendent function” (CW 8: para 67 ff.). In essence, Jung’s Transcendent Function has to do with opening a dialogue between opposing poles, to allow a new position or perspective to emerge which is neither a combination of nor a rejection of the two (Miller 2004). Jung says: The shuttling to and fro of arguments and affects represents the transcendent function of opposites. The confrontation of the two positions generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing . . . that leads to a new level of being, a new situation. The transcendent function manifests itself as a quality of conjoined opposites. (CW 8: para 189) In the process I also find the attitude of mindfulness as described by Buddha in the ‘Four Establishments of Mindfulness’ from the Satipatthana Sutta helpful (Kornfield 2004: 55–64). It implies a full awareness and acceptance of what is, sensations, thoughts, feeling, fantasies, and so on; even if there is distraction, one can be aware of that too. Joseph (1997: 147) speaks of an attitude of “non-attached involvement,” and from the Latin and French origins of the terms calls it a state of being ‘rolled into’ one’s experience, but not fixedly fastened to or entangled with it. I’ll now give some clinical examples of how this informs my practice.
(1) Experience the symptom mindfully Start with the presenting symptom, the current suffering, as in psychoanalysis. As Jung said: “In the intensity of the emotional disturbance itself lies the value, the energy which he should have at his disposal in order to remedy the state of reduced adaptation” (CW 8: para 166). In Tantric Buddhism, the energy contained in the intensity of the emotional turmoil is mobilized to transmute it (Moacanin 2003). Case example – catharsis through immobilized movement Aron presented with severe panic attacks while travelling, always half-way to his destination. He would then ‘freeze,’ forcing him to stop. In his immobilized state, he was highly agitated and couldn’t stand still either; he had to pace around in circles, just to release the agitation. Paradoxically, he couldn’t go any further, but he couldn’t stand still either. His suffering manifested in the simultaneous polar extremities of immobilization and agitation, passivity and hyperactivity. We used an immersion technique, going into the feelings and symptoms, almost like taking a journey within and through the symptom sensations. This prompted a cathartic release over a few sessions around a childhood
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trauma happening about the age of seven. The theme was of being left alone to journey by foot over long distances and wide open spaces. The worst was being at the midpoint of the journey, at times in severe weather and completely alone. From the sessions he gained insights on the origin of his ‘half-way’ panic attacks, and understood the ‘immobilized in movement’ paradox. After the cathartic sessions, the intensity of the feelings during a journey was reduced. He could mindfully experience the ‘tugging’ of the impulse to stop, simultaneously with the agitated hyperactive sensations, while choosing to move on toward his destination. He could eventually (in a temperate ‘middle way’) be mindful of standstill and movement experiences, without the suffering attachment and extremities of being passive and hyperactive. In the last session he described a “new sense of belonging and safety within myself . . . I can move anywhere with confidence.” On 15-month follow-up after the last session, there was no recurrence of the panic attacks. Aron’s ‘new position or perspective’ from the duality was mainly a release through catharsis, of stored pain manifesting in the extremities of ‘immobilized agitation.’ Through mindfulness of both opposites, a freedom of choice and a sense of belonging emerged, where he could embrace experience instead of avoid it.
(2) Immerse into the pain Sink into and engage with the discomfort, negative affect, or mood, as Jung said, “without reserve” (CW 8: para 167). One can use writing, drawing, painting, spontaneous fantasies, active imagination, movements/gesture/ dance, sound, inner dialogues, and inner sensing. All of this can be, according to Jung, “. . . a kind of enrichment and clarification of the affect . . .” (CW 8: para 167). It reminds one of Tozan’s Zen koan: When cold, let it be so cold that it kills you; when hot, let it be so hot that it kills you (Sekida 1977). If we read ‘that it kills your ego,’ we might get a sense of immersion into the experience. When cold, be fully and thoroughly cold; when hot, be fully and thoroughly hot. Case example – unifying and healing symbols Mary is a 45-year-old married woman referred by a urologist for psychological post-operative pain management, due to allergies to many types of analgesia. The strategy was to vary the methods of pain management between the polarity of distraction from, and immersion into, the pain. This would be the ‘middle way’ polarity. To overdo distraction to the extent of numbness, or immersion to the extent of being overwhelmed, would be out of balance, off-center and, by definition, suffering. For distraction she was taught a form of self-hypnosis with deep relaxation.
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She also had to work out an activity and sensory stimulation program for herself to use in bed after the operation. For the immersion into pain she was taught a form of mindfulness, almost a pain meditation, where she had to go into the sensations and be aware of how they manifested. She was taught how to feel its intensity, energy, texture, colour, sound, movement, and so on. She enjoyed this as a different approach to just immediately trying to quell the pain. During the first evening she woke up early with “quite severe pain.” She did deep relaxation and combined it with mindful immersion. Suddenly a spontaneous fantasy appeared where she was floating weightlessly in the warm Mediterranean Ocean. The painful area was soothed but a “little red fish with sharp fins still nibbled at the area.” Next a school of Dolphins came, chased away the little red fish, and performed a “breathtaking water ballet.” In the fantasy she observed this ballet for a long time until they started moving further and further away, and the “sea and sky became one.” This image left her feeling “free, happy and weightless,” with no pain and the ability to “just be” for a long while. She used a variety of techniques, but preferred the “letting it be” mode of mindful awareness, and on two further occasions when she experienced pain, and “allowed it to happen,” different spontaneous fantasies emerged. Seven days after the operation she was discharged without any adverse side effects or uncontrollable pain reactions since the operation. One can say she had pain but didn’t suffer. Mary’s ‘new position or perspective’ from the duality was spontaneous fantasies filled with a variety of symbols, and the occasional mode of ‘just being.’ Jung mentioned how often the new thing which arises between the opposites is the symbol (Miller 2004: 45). Dehing (1993: 232) summarizes it as follows: . . . when a conflict appears between two positions, it is important to make the two poles as conscious as possible; if the conflict is borne, the pain endured, a third term may emerge, a living symbol which transcends the opposition. The symbol is the object of the mediating function and carries pieces of both the opposites (Miller 2004). Interesting too that Jung started linking the Transcendent Function to Self when he states: “The opposites are united by a neutral or ambivalent bridge, a symbol expressing either side in such a way that they can function together. . . . The bridge is the ‘uniting symbol,’ which represents psychic totality, the self ” (quoted in Miller 2004: 71). Mary’s description of the sea and the sky becoming one as the dolphins gradually moved away, as well as her mode of ‘just being,’ is close to realizing, for a moment, the void of union and wholeness, accompanied by bliss, which neutralized all suffering at that moment.
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(3) Constellate the polarities consciously The inherent polarities of the experience can surface through an immersion process, as described above. It can also be further clarified and unpacked through analytical probing or questioning of the affect regarding its context, possible intention, and opposing personal qualities. A polarity map or constellation is created with the two painful extremes and the harmonious ‘middle way’ polarity. At this stage, as Jung (CW 8: para 185) would say, “The ego takes the lead, but the unconscious must be allowed to have its say too.” The process is what Magid (2002) would call working with our natural koans. Young-Eisendrath says the Transcendent Function has led her to have an “ironic view of therapy,” defined by Schafer as a readiness “to seek out internal contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes” (Young-Eisendrath 1993: 163). As in Tantra, one is continually facing the conflict of opposites in the effort to transcend them (Moacanin 2003). Case example – just “this” Cathy is a volunteer worker to many nongovernmental organizations, a singer, and an interior decorator. She describes a “frantic fast-paced life,” with her “mind always racing,” her schedule always full, and constant sleeplessness; almost hypo-manic. On the other hand, she experiences an occasional feeling of “lethargic lifelessness” (almost “like being drugged”). In our second session, she recognized how her lifestyle took the temperate opposites of busy/engaged/euphoric on the one hand and relaxed/quiet/calm on the other, to the extremes of frenetic/hypomanic and lethargic/lifeless, respectively. She specifically saw how the lethargic/lifeless feeling acted ‘as the cause’ for the frenetic activity and hypomanic state. She was afraid of the lethargic lifeless feeling and counteracted it with frenetic activity. She discovered how her fear started during two near-death experiences, and remembered how she fought against ‘letting go (lethargic), dying and emptiness (lifeless).’ She saw how every time she gets close to feeling these feelings, she frantically occupied herself with activities and ‘doing.’ On the other hand, she also saw how frenetic activity in turn leads to the lethargic state, to ‘complete emptiness and exhaustion.’ Her insight into how one polarity acts as a seed for the other, reminds one strongly of the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination, and applies particularly to the Buddha’s’ famous formulation: When this is, that is; This arising, that arises; When this is not, that is not; This ceasing, that ceases. (Quoted in Spiegelman et al. 1994: 131)
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Although Cathy is a Christian and does not know about the Buddhist description, I took poetic license and played with the above formulation during our session: When lethargic is, frenetic is; Lethargic arising, frenetic arising; When lethargic is not, frenetic is not; Lethargic ceasing, frenetic ceasing. She laughed with real understanding, and could hold both opposites at once in a gesture of the left hand on one side and the right on the other. At that point I asked her what it would be like “in the middle of, and all around, both.” There was a long and tangibly peaceful silence. She then placed her left hand onto her right shoulder, and her right hand onto her left shoulder, and eventually just said “This.” I could hear the proverbial Buddhist haiku by Basho: “The old pond/A frog jumps in/Plop!” (in Langan 2003: 138). When after another long silence I asked “This?,” she said: “Yes, just the sound of the waterfall and the bird – nothing more, nothing less.” During this long silence she was absolutely peaceful, yet fully engaged and aware. It sometimes happens that when two contrasting opposites are held at once, a smile or laughter will ensue. Humor and laughter can at times be the ‘new position or perspective’ from the duality, because the internal dynamics of humor thrives on the awareness of contrasts and unexpected paradoxes. The long peaceful yet aware silence, combined with the clear perception and immediacy, reminds one of the Buddhist terms ‘suchness’ or ‘as-it-isness’ (Welwood 2000: 103). As one Mahayana Sutra puts it: “If we are not hampered by our confused subjectivity, this, our worldly life is an activity of nirvana itself ” (Epstein 1995: 83). In Cathy’s case, as Epstein would say, nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer. Her polarized ego (Jungian) or manifest self (Buddhist) was not destroyed, but used as an avenue to see in a new light, through the interdependent origination (mutual seeding) of its opposites. She had a moment of No-Self in the middle of, and all around, her most prevalent polarities.
(4) Allow the new perspective to emerge Although freedom from suffering is the ultimate aim, we don’t make it that, because moments of transcendence are not manufactured or orchestrated. As Jung said: “The transcendent function is not something one does oneself; it comes rather from experiencing the conflict of the opposites” (quoted in Miller 2004: 58). All we can assist the patient with is to go into any side of the polarity with engaged mindfulness, to experience and see the dynamic between the one side and the other, and then to hold the polarity, to embrace the extremes with openness. The ‘new position or perspective’ happens
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spontaneously, of its own accord. This holding embrace and open witnessing is already as Miller (2004: 126) says the Transcendent Function as the ‘metaphorical third,’ where the choice between either one or the other is suspended so that the relationship between them becomes the focus. The Transcendent Function makes it possible to move away from the either/or approach, to the both/and or neither/nor approach to the opposites. With the Transcendent Function, then, as Miller (2004: 128) says, “. . . the field or vessel in which the opposites are cooked . . .,” affirmed and negated, a new alchemical fourth, a coniunctio can emerge, which goes beyond, to new dimensions, indeed to the numinosum in our everyday experience (Miller 2004: 141). I want to emphasize the phrase ‘in our everyday experience.’ The Transcendent Function makes a conjunction possible between the everyday and the numinosum, the ego and Wholeness (the Jungian Self ), the particular and the fundamental, the personal and the universal, the Buddhist self and the No-Self Void. The everyday and the ego are not destroyed, just seen in a new perspective to the No-Self, with what the Madhyamaka teaches, “. . . the eye of wisdom” (quoted in Moacanin 2003: 83), which sees the unity between opposites, the interdependent emptiness of their identities.
(5) Apply the insights and experience to daily life After any deep insight or realization, the emphasis in therapy should always be on the traditional Zen challenge of “taking a step off the top of the hundred foot pole” (Magid 2003: 254), and processing with the patient the practical everyday implications, and how to live with the insight in real life here and now. Magid (2002: 65) emphasizes the importance of ‘postenlightenment practice’ (referring to Kornfield’s book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry). Jung emphasized the importance of re-embodying and integrating a ‘coniunctio’ experience into everyday life: “The reuniting of the spiritual position with the body obviously means that the insights gained should be made real . . . making a reality of the man who has acquired some knowledge of his paradoxical wholeness” (CW 14: para 679). He continues by saying that transformation is only a notable advance “. . . if the centre experience proves to be a spiritus rector of daily life . . . for self-knowledge has certain ethical consequences which are not just impassively recognized but demand to be carried out in practice” (CW 14: para 777–778).
Conclusions One can see that experiences and insights emerging from the active processing of polarities can vary: Cathartic release Mindful choice
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Belonging Embracing Spontaneous fantasies and symbols ‘Just being’ Laughter Silence ‘This’ or ‘suchness’ ‘Both’ and ‘neither of either’ These experiences and insights emerge as a result of engaging polarities and uniting opposites through dialogue and mindfulness. They vary according to the person’s circumstances and address the unique requirements of the moment. One can see them as manifestations of the Buddhist No-Self or Jungian Self, while realizing this Void can never be described or captured into words or experiences. The Tantric Buddha Vajradhare appears in many aspects, with the form of appearance shaped by the needs of the trainees (Magid 2002). This is because the No-Self is empty, without boundaries, and therefore flexible to manifest in any form or shape. Emptiness is unknowable, but can be seen in all forms, and in every experience. Like in the Heart of Prajnaparamita Sutra: “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” (in Moacanin 2003: 77). Therefore, go into the pain, don’t be afraid of the hurt. Get to know the inner life of the wound by uncovering the polarity. Facilitate a to-and-fro dialogue between the seeming opposites, including how they interdependently relate to each other, without clinging or condemning. Go to pieces without falling apart (Epstein’s book title – Safran 2003: 166); as Jung said, “Without the experience of the opposites there is no experience of wholeness . . .” (CW 12: para 24). Allow the various ways in which a new ‘third’ or even ‘alchemical fourth’ can manifest and happen, including moments of understanding the Void or No-Self. This is a complex and a simple project, to see the true nature of everything, and yet to just simply process another polarity from everyday experience. I agree with Jung (CW 16: para 537) when he says: “. . . every endeavour of our human intelligence should be bent to the achieving of that simplicity where contradictories are reconciled.” Through this reconciliation we contribute to the continuous incarnation and illumination of the Void, the Wholeness, the Self/No-Self in every experience. This is why we can only marvel at Joshu’s (the master of the temple) simple and wise reply when the monk begged him for higher order instructions: He asked, “Have you eaten your rice gruel yet?” The monk answered, “Yes, I have.” Joshu said, “Then wash your bowl” (in Magid 2003: 294). Every experience has ‘everything it needs’ within itself.
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References Adler, G. (ed.), in collaboration with Jaffe, A. (1976) Jung, C. G. Letters 2: 1951–1961, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dehing, J. (1993) ‘The Transcendent Function: A critical re-evaluation,’ Journal of Analytical Psychology, 38, 221–235. Engler, J. (2003) ‘Being somebody and being nobody: A reexamination of the understanding of Self in psychoanalysis and Buddhism’, p. 41 in J. D. Safran (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue, Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Epstein, M. (1995) Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, New York: Basic Books. Heynekamp, E. E. (2002) ‘Coming home: the difference it makes’, p. 259 in P. YoungEisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge. Holmes, K. and Holmes, K. (1999) Maitreya on Buddha Nature, Forres, Scotland: Altea Publishing. Joseph, S. M. (1997) ‘Presence and absence through the mirror of transference: A model of the transcendent function,’ Journal of Analytical Psychology, 42, 139–156. Jung, C. G. (1916) Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, trans. H. G. Baynes, London: Watkins, 1967. —— (1953–1973) Collected Works, eds Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, 20 vols, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kawai, H. (2002) ‘What is I? Reflections from Buddhism and psychotherapy,’ p. 144 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge. Kornfield, J. (ed.) (2004) Teachings of the Buddha, Boston and London: Shambhala. Langan, R. (2003) ‘The dissolving of dissolving itself,’ p. 138 in J. D. Safran (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue, Boston: Wisdom Publications. Magid, B. (2002) Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy, Boston: Wisdom Publications. —— (2003) ‘Your ordinary mind,’ p. 254 in J. D. Safran (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue, Boston: Wisdom Publications. Mathers, D. (2002) ‘Karma and individuation: The boy with no face,’ p. 221 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge. Miller, J. C. (2004) The Transcendent Function: Jung’s Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue with the Unconscious, New York: State University of New York Press. Moacanin, R. (2003) Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart, Boston: Wisdom Publications. Okano, M. (2002) ‘The consciousness-only school,’ p. 233 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge. Rinpoche, Ven. Khenpo Karthar (1992) Dharma Paths, New York: Snow Lion Publications. Safran, J. D. (2003) Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue, Boston: Wisdom Publications.
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Sekida, K. (1977) Two Zen Classics, New York: Weatherhill. Spiegelman, J. M. and Miyuki, M. (1994) Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, Delhi: New Age Books. Welwood, J. (2000) Towards a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation, Boston and London: Shambhala. Young-Eisendrath, P. (1993) ‘Locating the transcendent: Inference, rupture, irony,’ p. 163 in M. A. Mattoon (ed.) The Transcendent Function: Individual and Collective Aspects, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress for Analytical Psychology, Chicago, Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag. —— (2002) ‘The transformation of human suffering: A perspective from psychotherapy and Buddhism’, p. 72 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge.
Chapter 13
Stop running Dale Mathers
This chapter explores Eastern and Western ideas about how meaning is made. I suggest that the making of meaning requires a safe space within which to do it. Often, this is an empty space. This empty space could be called compassion. It is created by what analytical psychologists call the Transcendent Function, and is found in the Buddhist experience of meditation. I will use two myths to explore this: the first is a fictionalized account of clinical work with a young war veteran called Mike; the other, a story about one of Buddha’s first disciples, Angulimala. My main points are as follows: meaning is a fluent form, in which the content-elements change yet the meaning remains (like a waterfall or candle flame); meaning occurs as we open and close to percepts. Buddhism and analytical psychology are two systems describing meaning-making processes. They both offer a commentary on the aesthetics of meaning – valuing, in common, wisdom and compassion. Both systems describe this as a capacity to ‘be with not knowing,’ that is ‘to be – in empty space.’ Sometimes, this space is imagined as existing after death; or, it may be a place we go when we die; or it is a place we exist in before we are born. Moments of meaningmaking have a timeless, or time-free, quality. We experience such moments when we face death. The young men whose stories I tell were both killers. They faced and brought death; or, they are heroes. So, the archetype I am exploring is the archetype of the hero. But, what does hero mean? To the people killed, neither of these youths was a hero. Now, as meaning is a fluent form, so the meaning of ‘hero’ depends upon which end of the flowing sword (katana) you are – giving or receiving. Percepts are like swords, penetrating the world, and penetrating us. Just as a sword may wound or revenge, threaten or offer safety, so may a percept. We continually open and close to percepts, as long as we breathe. Each of us forms meaning from percepts, whether they are conscious – that is, with intent – or unconscious, by accident, by chance or by coincidence; by timeless means. To make timeless meanings requires timeless time, time spent doing nothing.
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In the clinical example, my spending nine months during Mike’s analysis in his absence was crucial. And accidental, on my part. For it was in this time on our own – time apart – that we were able to contemplate, from our two perspectives, the meaning of suffering. Within which timeless, time-free space is meaning born from suffering? I ask this, not because suffering is more or less meaningful than any other experience, just that suffering is why people end up on a couch (or perhaps on a meditation cushion), looking at it, experiencing it, reliving it. Let’s suppose suffering arises, among other causes, from failures in meaning-making. If so, then observation of people’s meaning systems and their analysis could let them make changes themselves to their system, so they may make meanings from life in a harmonious and aesthetically pleasing way. Meanings, whether subjective or objective, whether of a person, object or situation, are not fixed. Meanings are context-dependent fluent forms. A fluent form is one in which the parts change continually, yet the sense impression remains the same. A wave, or waterfall, or a candle flame: these are fluent forms, the particles change, yet the shape is maintained; likewise with a tree, a forest, or indeed a human being. And if this is so for our body, then it is much more so for our mind. An analytic truth is that we do not, as analysts, need to do so very much to bring about change. Change happens anyway. It is a natural result of being time-bound. We are born. We die. Perhaps some hero kills us. When something changes, our meaning system has to adapt. The heat generated by adaptation we call affect, or feeling. Meaning is about the aesthetics of feeling. It is an aesthetic determined by feeling. ‘I like this thing or that thing’ – so, it is good. ‘I dislike this thing or that thing’ – so, it is bad. In the Buddha’s own language, Pali, the word kusala means ‘good’ and akusala means ‘bad.’ I will use these Pali words again later. They are used for both moral and aesthetic discriminations, as in English. To make such discriminations we have to open up to a percept and then close on it so that it can be evaluated: How does this percept feel? These tiny acts of evaluation of our feelings lead to adaptation to our environment. When we experience this harmoniously with others, we call it empathy. Put simply, meaning systems tend to be open or closed and tend to respond to change either by opening or closing. The rate of change of a meaning system, its speed, and the rate of change of the change itself, its acceleration, are two concepts I will borrow here from classical mechanics. (If this makes anyone giddy – asking ‘what is classical mechanics doing in a chapter about meaning and meditation’ – that is what accelerating a meaning system feels like. Rather like jet lag or culture shock, we have two percept-systems running at the same time, and, until one blurs into the other, it hurts.) To begin with, then, here is a Newtonian view of meaning. A meaning – an idea in motion – remains at rest, or moves at a constant speed if the sum of feelings acting on it is zero (first law). A meaning
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accelerates, changes in significance, depending on the size of the feelings acting on it, and in the same direction as the feelings (second law). When a meaning exerts a feeling on another meaning, it experiences a meaning change in return (third law). This is often stated as: ‘to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ Jung described this movement of meaning using a Greek word – enantiodromia – the tendency of any feeling to turn in its opposite. Buddhists talk about this when they talk about karma, and the law of cause and effect. In contemporary Western slang we say ‘what goes around, comes around.’ Imagine a skating rink. On it is a large adult pushing a small child. As well as the force the adult exerts, the child exerts an equal, but opposite, force on the adult. As the adult’s mass is larger so his or her acceleration will be smaller. Likewise with the impact of the meaning systems of adults on children. A child’s meaning system is more fluid, more changeable; an adult’s is more fixed. This is so because first we have to learn object constancy, which begins around 18 months to two years of age, according to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. This is part of what the word ego means – not so much ‘I’ as ‘an awareness of me, going on being’ – that is, I go on being a constant object to myself. Most of us, most of the time, feel this as ‘kusala’ – good. Neither is kusala or akusala, better or worse, they are simply different. Perhaps this is why we all become more conservative as we age, assuming we’ve heard it all before? Or perhaps this is due to failing memory – which causes a loss of object constancy. We can’t remember if we’ve heard it before. Pride, that is, the avoidance of shame, may cause us to say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing new here,’ when there is. Our meaning system has closed, due to age.
Object constancy In analytical psychology, particularly in Britain, we may talk about humans relating to other humans as ‘object relations’ – an object is a person or part of a person which attracts interest and can satisfy a basic need. That is, ‘object’ refers to a person who is not the subject. For a person to be a reliable, constant, good-enough object, they need to have held the subject in mind repeatedly, reliably, and with a good-enough intent. I’m spelling out what allows object constancy, even though, as meaning is fluent, there can be no such thing as a constant object. The best we can manage in healthy object relating is ambivalence. We learn that an object can be both good and bad at the same time – or neither good nor bad. This is a meaning-making construction, or logical operator, both/and/neither/nor, which I will discuss again later. Meanings change as percepts and perceptual abilities develop. Let’s now play two meaning systems into each other, Buddhism and analytical psychology, to study aesthetics: here, the aesthetics of the hero archetype. All I wish
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to show is how observing, and not observing, a person’s meaning system allowed the system to change. That is, change was not brought about by skilful interpretation – rather, by not interpreting. As my patient, Mike, saw how he created his own suffering, and the suffering of those around him, this allowed conscious choice. This is called agency. As Polly Young-Eisendrath (Hall and Young-Eisendrath 1991: 109) reminds us, agency is one of the invariant qualities of Self: the others being coherence and continuity (which together allow object constancy), and a capacity for feeling-filled (affective) relating. Where does this relating occur? Let’s suppose it occurs at two places, two boundaries. The first is between ego (the time-bound part of the psyche) and Self (the time-free part of the psyche). The second is between Self and Other: between me and the outside world. To use an analogy with which we’re all familiar – air travel. We cross a boundary to leave our country, and cross another to enter a new one. In between we’re in ‘airline land’ . . . in transit, neither in one country nor another. The first boundary between ego (my country or your country) and Self (airline land, where one is everywhere and nowhere); the second is between Self (our planet) and the outside world (universe). When a person has to develop with two contradictory boundarydefining systems, then forming a stable ego, a sense of ‘who I am’ becomes all but impossible. Meaning-making cannot be stable without a secure base . . . without somewhere to land. In Theravada Buddhism, meaning-making is seen as a natural consequence of percept-seeking behavior. This is laid out in the Abhidhamma literature, as a series of interlocking matrixes. Abhidhamma is another Pali word, translating as Abhi – ‘truth,’ and dhamma – ‘the nature of things;’ so, ‘how we know things’ or, phenomenology. It is a cross between a logical analysis and a cognitive psychology, and about two and a half thousand years older than contemporary cognitive psychology. For example, here is how it describes visual sense contact: The five factors of sense contact (phassa-pancaka) are: 1 2 3 4 5
sense contact feeling perception mental formation consciousness
Here is a visible object. Is it interesting or disinteresting? I consciously choose to look at it. I have an image of it. I know what it is. (Frauwallner 1995)
Both analytical psychology and Abhidhamma are empirical methods, based on experiences (subjective, objective, and intersubjective) rather than on beliefs. But to build up our ability to make sense contact, to achieve object constancy, requires a secure base. What happens when one is missing? What might this look like?
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Clinical example (Please note: this is a fiction, created with my patient’s help, and his consent.) Mike is an athletic young artist. When we met he had dreadlocks (matted long hair) because, as he explained, he was born white but raised black. His white parents owned a farm in the lonely African bush. He came to analysis as he’d lost the will to live. We met weekly for a year, then twice a week for six months, until he stormed out, yelling “You don’t care . . .” and slamming my door so hard it nearly came off its hinges. He was near to unhinged himself. Nine months later, he stormed back, opening his first session with “. . . and another thing . . .” as if there had been no break. We continued together for a further six or seven years, meeting three times a week. In the nine-month space I continued to ‘see’ him, once a week, keeping one of his sessions empty. Providing an empty space to which I knew he would return. This is how. Mike breast fed from his black nanny, till he was 18 months old. Our first contact lasted 18 months. He grew up naked, with her children, slept in her hut, or under the stars, hunted with a spear, fished with his hands; swam, fought, listened to stories around the camp fire. But on some Sundays his black mother put him into shirt and shorts, and gave him to his white mother for “the afternoon tea ceremony.” Mike felt he was on the menu every time. Mother took Valium with her tea, saying “I’m just a little depressed, darling.” She believed Mike was retarded because he spoke very poor English, though, unlike her, he spoke fluent “African.” His alcoholic father was often violent, and the tea ceremony regularly ended with a beating for having “native” table manners. Then, at puberty, instead of initiation into the tribe, which he expected, he was sent to board at a Dickensian “White African” school. White initiation meant being forced to wear shoes and school uniform, bullying by the other boys, and regular beatings from the staff. He ran away at 16 and became a Commando in a nearby war. Of his platoon of 24 boys, only four survived. Like a Vietnam Veteran, at 20, on the losing side and feeling a loser, he went to college. Self-medication with cannabis and other drugs, and good counselling, staved off suicide. When he ran away from Africa and came to the UK he went on a drug binge. Why? Because, he’d helped take out a “Rebel” village. In action, by accident, he killed a black nursing mother and her baby. He went from hero to zero. We’d reached this point in his story when he quit. It was his dreams which helped him come back. I’ll describe three now, and one later. The first dream, just before he left: I’m outside a White Afrikaans Church, with its typical high gable ends. Inside, behind the altar, is a stained glass window. In the window, Jesus is crucified on two crossed AK 47 rifles. On the altar is one of my boyhood war comics.
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He interpreted this as his boyhood dream of being a hero, but the real experience felt like being crucified. The second dream, in the space between: I’m in a mud hut. An old woman is smearing intricate spiral designs on the floor with cow dung. He explained that in his tribe, this is an act of great respect; for a cow is sacred, and ownership of cows is how value is measured. When he told the dream, he said “mother” in African, and sobbed for a long time. This was the first time he cried, with me. He realized he’d joined the Army as a way to revenge himself on his black mother, for the pain-filled Sundays. And worst, for losing her at puberty. The third dream, just after he came back: I’m white, but in tribal dress, about to make my passage to manhood, to go on a lion hunt. Mike had taken hundreds of life-endangering risks. Yet he felt he’d missed initiation and acceptance by two tribes, black and white. In his own meaning system he wasn’t either brave, or ‘A brave,’ but aged 12, he risked his life to save a friend from drowning. At 19 he saved a brother-in-arms, under heavy machine gun fire. He could not, at that time, accept that heroism is heroism, whether you are on the winning or the losing side. He began to understand his drug use as the opposite to initiation – dependence rather than an interdependence. The dreams reflect the internal battle between a boy accepted as good by his black mother and rejected as bad by his white mother. He was, as an infant, a child and an adolescent, never allowed to be both good and bad at the same time; to experience ambivalence. Two meaning systems clashed in his developing mind. Imagine two adults pulling a child on an ice rink, as described earlier. When we reached the point where he told me about violently pushing back, and killing, he had to violently push me away. Meaning decelerated. First, in the many rejections by his white mother. Then, in rejection by his white peers at school. Then, in killing. After which he went ‘on the run’ – running from himself. So, is this youth a hero or a villain? And did I really know he would come back? Well, no; not consciously. My intuition said he’d stop running. He’d had the courage to come to analysis. I knew he’d never desert a comrade under fire . . . especially now his comrade was himself as a boy. So I kept a space. I was helped in doing this by holding in my mind a story about another young hero, or villain: one of Buddha’s first disciples, called Angulimala.
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Angulimala Angulimala’s father was the Prime Minister of Kusala, the kingdom next door to that where Buddha was born. The King of Kusala was Buddha’s cousin. The boy was gifted, and top student at his university. The other students envied him. At that time, the custom was that students gave their teacher a gift on graduation. His envious peers told the tutor that Angulimala was having an affair with his wife. So, when the boy asked “what gift would you like?” the answer came back, “a necklace made of a thousand fingers.” (Anguli means finger in Pali, and Mala means necklace.) We can imagine this was a stormy encounter, in which the boy became unhinged: his reason gave way, and he set off to get the fingers. He became a bandit, and a killer. One day, when he’d only a handful of fingers left to collect, he saw Buddha walking towards him. He decided to get Buddha’s fingers to complete the necklace. But, as he ran after Buddha, the harder he ran, the further away Buddha got. “Why don’t you stop running,” yelled the exhausted young serial killer. “I have stopped,” Buddha replied, “why don’t you stop running?” And Angulimala was enlightened. He became a disciple, shaved his long matted dreadlocked bandit’s hair, took up the robe and bowl. The locals were appalled by Buddha’s act. The boy was badly beaten up on his first alms round, and came back covered in blood. And in shock, for he’d realised the evil (Akusala) of his acts, for the first time. (Nanamoli and Bodhi 1995: pp. 710–717).
Playing with meaning Meaning is a fluent form. It moves. Buddha challenged Angulimala to stop running from himself. The boy had been enviously attacked by his revered teacher and his so-called friends. This produced murderous rage. The boy’s meaning system, like Mike’s, had closed. We can imagine that both boys, both killers, had made a symbolic equation, like this: I have no value: therefore I can kill. If I kill, then that proves I have no value. Let’s look again at Mike’s first dream: I’m outside a White Afrikaans Church, with its typical high gable ends. Inside, behind the altar, is a stained glass window. In the window, Jesus is crucified on two crossed AK 47 rifles. On the altar is one of my boyhood war comics. This contrasts a symbol of a boy’s dreams of being a hero with a Western
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symbol of sacrifice. No doubt Angulimala expected to be treated as an ‘academic hero;’ after all, he was the university’s star pupil. Both boys’ meaning systems underwent catastrophic deceleration. When Mike first touched the depth of his suffering, it was too much, for him and perhaps for me, so our relationship ‘broke down’ – and we had a time of being with not knowing. Perhaps, like the White Church, ‘the ends were too high’ – the goal he felt he had to achieve, of redemption through suffering, was too great. These analytic sessions without my patient became meditative: I did and did not know he would return. I began to watch my feelings flow to and fro between knowing and not knowing, playing with the meanings in this dream. In this space, I think, I did, as Jung suggests, ‘learn from the patient,’ and learnt to use what he calls the Transcendent Function.
The Transcendent Function Jung described this as: “. . . a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites, and it consists of a series of fantasy occurrences which appear spontaneously in dreams and visions” (Jung 1966; CW 7: 121). This function mediates bridging, it represents a ‘between place’ in the mind, in which objects can be real, imaginary, and symbolic all at the same time. Jung first described this function in 1916 (1960; CW 8: 31) while working through a mystical experience. Six weeks earlier, flooded by his unconscious, he wrote a book called The Seven Sermons to the Dead by automatic writing (Hoeller 1982): as if he had a ‘Spirit Guide’ holding his pen. The Guide he called ‘Basilides of Alexandria.’ In it he describes the difference between the time-bound world of the ten thousand things, called the pleroma, and the time-free world where there is everything and nothing, called the noumena. Bridging between these two worlds is what the meaning-making work of analysis aims to do. My analyst, Rosemary Gordon, described it like this: bridging functions exist intra-psychically. For instance, ‘the area of experience,’ or ‘of illusion’ as described by Winnicott acts as a bridge between the external, the real, the objective world on the one hand and the individual’s personal, private or unconscious world of wishes, hopes, fears and fantasies on the other. In other words, the area of illusion acts as a bridge where the outer and inner worlds can meet and play together. (Gordon 1993: 7) This is a mystical experience. The American pioneer of psychology, William James, said he could only speak of mystical states at second hand: but he believed firmly in their reality. After studying contemplatives, he wrote, in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
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Our normal or waking consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, separated by the filmiest of screens there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (James 1890/1950, in Wallace 2000, vol i: 420) James observed that contemplative experience overcomes boundaries between people, between the time-bound individual and the timeless reality. My 50-minute ‘empty space’ allowed me time to play with the experiences Mike had shared, time for me to stop running – to stop trying to think of clever interpretations. There was no need. If you set off to be a hero and end up a killer, that doesn’t need interpreting. Mike didn’t need to be told ‘it’s your mother,’ did he? His situation is not interpretable, it is impossible. Interpretation would be akusala . . . unwise. Once I could see that clearly, the empty space became much simpler to occupy. It became one of compassion. This word in English comes from Latin: ‘con –’ meaning ‘with’ and ‘passion’ meaning ‘feeling.’ This mediates bridging of meanings between people. It is a key part of the Transcendent Function. In a ‘between,’ or bridging space, objects do not have to be constant. Meanings do not have to be good or bad, kusala or akusala, black or white. Instead of an either/or logical operator, we can use a paradoxical logical operator. (A logical operator is a linguistic bridge, the term comes from computer science and cybernetics – the study of communication processes.) We can use both/and/neither/nor: Mike can be both/and/neither/nor a hero, both/and/neither/nor a killer. Here is the same bridging logical operator in the story of Angulimala. When on his alms round, he met a woman sobbing in childbirth, he was so upset by her suffering, he went and asked Buddha whether this always happened when a baby was born. “It can,” Buddha replied. “Did it happen when I was born?” the boy asked. “Perhaps,” said Buddha, “What are you going to do about it?” The boy thought. “I will sing to her,” he said, and so he did. And the woman’s birth pains eased, and the baby was born. To this day, Angulimala’s song is sung to women in labor by monks in the Theravada tradition. So the same disciple became the saint of both murderers and criminals, and of childbirth. He is, in the our tradition, a figure who bridges giving and taking life. In Angulimala’s story, Buddha was the bridge. Because he stopped running, the boy could stop running. It would be grandiose of me to suppose either that I had or have stopped running, or that some wise act of mine brought about the changes which came about in Mike’s meaning system and
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object world. But I did hold the space. And he did come back. He had also created a timeless contemplative experience, he got stoned for most of the nine months. Marijuana is effective at stopping, or slowing the apparent movement of time. It ‘drops out’ chunks of perceptual experience, allowing constant objects to lose perceptual constancy. Meaning occurs as we open and close to percepts. The moment at which Mike ‘lost it’ and stormed out, followed him yelling at me “you think I’m neurotic, don’t you?” I’d hesitated a fraction of a second before replying, knowing any answer, yes or no, or even the smart “I wonder why you ask?” would be taken as a judgement, which would make him wrong. In the event, I said, “Yes, of course.” It wasn’t my confirmation of what he knew already that made him leave, it was that, while he was overwhelmed by feelings of murderous rage, and all ready to run . . . I clearly was not. I had a space. I was using it to think. He couldn’t. His envy, temporarily, killed me off. In the resulting nine-month space, I’d had time to open up around Mike’s perceptions of himself. He’d had time to close on the pain of being perceived, but, and this is perhaps the most important thing – certainly, it is what he said mattered most to him – being seen, but not judged.
Conclusion Meaning is a fluent form: it tends to flow along gradients of narrative power. That is, who gets to name whether an act is heroic or cowardly? Who says whether smearing a hut with dung is sanctifying it, turning a floor into an altar, or just smearing a floor with shit? In the crux moment just described, for me, meaning could still flow; for Mike, it couldn’t. The same was true in the crux moment between Angulimala and Buddha. Usually, unequal power gradients create premature closure. If I have an AK 47 pointing at your head, it is likely I have nominative power. Especially if you know it is loaded and you know I don’t mind if I kill you. In the exchange between Angulimala and his tutor, the boy thought he was in an adult-to-adult exchange, yet he left as a murderous child. In the exchanges between Mike and the world of white adults, he always felt like a bad child; to encounter a white adult who was willing to have an adult-toadult exchange with him over a long time was such a novelty, it caused him to open to a new percept – that he had value. This was accomplished by ‘doing nothing.’ Buddhism and analytical psychology are systems which describe meaningmaking processes. Both involve a great deal of ‘doing nothing.’ So, how do these systems comment on the aesthetics of meaning? At a formal Japanese party, a Geisha’s paid relational role is to give the event ‘yugen.’ This translates as ‘mystery, the dark, the unknown,’ or as ‘deeply felt beauty’ – that is, a dark aesthetic. The word means ‘to give beauty to life’ (Keene 1966). It symbolises something close to the word ‘numinous’ in English . . . ‘Numen’ is
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Latin for ‘a nod,’ an expression of consent – with the idea that the Spirits are agreeable. So, the word has come to mean ‘the spiritual.’ An analyst’s role is perhaps like that of a Geisha, a paid companion, who personifies a transcendent function. Both an analyst and a Geisha have in common placing a high value on wisdom and compassion. This is seen in being with not knowing, that is, in the empty space which they ‘do nothing’ to create.
References Frauwallner, E. (1995) Studies in Abhidamma Literature and the Origins of Buddhist Philosophical Systems, New York: State University of New York Press. Gordon, R. (1993) Bridges: Metaphor for Psychic Processes, London: Karnac. Hall, J. and Young-Eisendrath, P. (1991) Jung’s Self Psychology, New York: Guilford Press. Hoeller, S. (1982) The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, The Theosophical Publishing House. Jung, C. G. (1953–1973) Collected Works, eds Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, 20 vols, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Keene, D. (1966). No: The Classical Theatre of Japan, Tokyo: Kodansha. Nanamoli, B. and Bodhi, B. (trans.) (1995) ‘The Angulimala Sutta, number 86,’ in Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya, Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Wallace, A. (2000) The Taboo of Subjectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chapter 14
Mindfulness and the technology of healing Lessons from Western practice Chris Mace
Traditionally developed through meditative practices for spiritual ends, mindfulness has been incorporated into therapeutic interventions for psychological ailments in the West. In the process, mindfulness has become a component of a healing technology, distinct from psychoanalysis, that is described in a technical language free from Buddhist connotations. Although these new therapies have distanced themselves from their roots, they are beset by tensions which mimic and parallel those found within traditional practices.
Mindfulness: meanings and uses The term ‘mindfulness’ has become very popular in the West. As with any popular term, people can mean different things when they use it. I shall use it to refer to a particular kind of awareness, one often referred to as ‘bare attention.’ To be mindfully aware means, paradoxically, there is an absence of ‘mind.’ Mindful awareness is pre-conceptual and utterly transparent, even if surface chatter is present. It is highly receptive and not exclusive. Sensations, thoughts, or feelings are simply experienced for what they are. As a person’s ordinary reactive ways of restricting and conditioning awareness diminish, a sense of the suchness of things emerges. This quality of experience is indicated in several definitions of mindfulness: Daniel Goleman referred to “. . . facing the bare facts of experience, seeing each event as though occurring for the first time” (Goleman 1988: 73). And, in equating mindfulness with bare attention, Nyanaponika Thera referred to “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us, at the successive moments of perception” (Thera 1994: 73). Perhaps the simplest definition is that of Thich Nhat Hanh, for whom mindfulness is “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality” (Hanh 1991: 11). This elegant definition is, I think, very appealing. However, it can be similar to the appeal a mirage holds for a thirsty person looking across a desert. It offers satisfaction for the mind and the eye but, because it stays well out of reach when it is approached, it can leave the seeker thirsty. Let us look at it.
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‘Keeping’ implies effort, and a need for deliberate actions (including recollection) as well as a being aware of being aware. Deliberation, recollection, and conscious awareness do all feature in other attempts to define mindfulness. Next, using the word ‘alive’ to describe ‘consciousness’ opens up many possibilities by which qualities can be attributed to this awareness, for instance receptivity, spontaneity, or subtle vital affects such as joy or love. These too have all featured in other definitions. Lastly, the reference to ‘present reality’ is especially interesting for its ambiguity. In English, ‘the present’ is often used as a synonym for ‘now,’ making it natural to read ‘the present reality’ as ‘what is happening at this moment.’ Native English speakers will know that ‘present’ can also refer to relations in space, with ‘present reality’ being that which is experienced as close because it is ‘here.’ The ambiguities go further. For instance, we know that we can present things, including ‘presents’ (and lectures) to other people. A reality therefore has ‘presence’ because it presents itself in a peculiarly tangible way. Talk of a present reality can be a poetic way of conveying that this sense of presence is particularly strong. And then, most oddly, the English language also has a further, distinct use of ‘present.’ This is to be present to oneself, i.e. to be attentive or to have presence of mind (as opposed to being mentally absent). To be present in this sense is to be mindful, without any reference to what else is ‘here’ or ‘now.’ It therefore supports those like Nyanaponika Thera who emphasise immediate subjective realities (in experiences of the body or the mind) in the way they define mindfulness. As with any idea that is rich and enduring, there are several connotations of mindfulness that allow people to have slightly different conceptions of it. In qualifying awareness, these may emphasize deliberation or non-doing; presentness or recollection; affectivity or equanimity; breadth or receptivity. Some of this ambiguity is likely to reflect an inherent resistance of mindfulness to definition of any kind, simply because its qualities are virtual rather than tangible. In addition, some of the ambiguity reflects limits in translation between the language games of two very different worlds. (See Chapter 1 of Mace [2007] for a fuller discussion of the translation of ‘mindfulness’.) But, as Morgan and Morgan (2005) have noted, beyond these semantic considerations, there is also a significant overlap between the range of working descriptions of mindfulness, and the traditional ‘seven factors of enlightenment’ as set out in the Pali canon. (Following Walshe’s [1987] translation, these comprise: investigation of states; energy; delight; tranquility; concentration; and equanimity. The seventh factor is mindfulness, within which the other six are effectively balanced.) The psychology of enlightenment is, of course, the original context of the term, within the transformative psychology of early Buddhism. While the adoption of ‘mindfulness’ in the West is proceeding with little overt reference to this context, I think it is helpful to remember it on two counts. One is that the qualities labeled as enlightenment factors effectively delimit what we
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mean when we talk of being mindful. The other is that, as Jim Austin has noted, there is a very similar understanding of mindfulness within Zen and vipassana meditation (Austin 1998: 127). The fact that this common understanding is conceptualized differently in the two traditions reflects Zen’s antipathy to a gradualist approach towards enlightenment. If the idea of mindfulness is gaining currency in the West, so is the idea that it is good for you. Historically, mindfulness was the vehicle that makes the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth attainable through a radical mental purification that led to enlightenment. To use mindfulness as a vehicle for personal improvement will involve embracing at some level values that are embodied in the concept of enlightenment. This ideal is traditionally an extremely demanding and elusive one. (Nothing conveys this so well as the notion that many, many lifetimes are likely to be necessary for its attainment.) Nevertheless, mindfulness is being presented now as the bringer of benefits that are more limited, but readily attainable. It appears to be good for your health in protecting against so-called diseases of civilization such as high blood pressure, auto-immune diseases, and those mediated by endocrine stress responses (Kabat-Zinn 1990). In its recent application to health, the contributions of anxiety and depression to many illnesses, particularly when pain and reduced life expectancy are involved, was recognized. This led to therapeutic efforts that focused on the specific impact of mindfulness on mood and on a wide range of psychological illnesses as well as physical disorders. In addition to augmenting the range of available treatments, this work has made heuristic and practical contributions to our approaches to anxiety and depression as well as to psychotic, behavioral, and personality disorders. In doing so, ideas have been developed about how components of mindfulness constitute antidotes to common psychological afflictions. For example, being present counters a tendency to worry about the future or to be fixated about the past; being responsively aware promotes unflinching acceptance of warded-off experience in place of automatic patterns of avoidance or reactive action; and a capacity to experience thoughts as passing objects in awareness, rather than as facts, can prevent identification with them.
Mindfulness as psychotherapy This interest in ameliorating individual problems or symptoms is at odds with the traditional values of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis tends to concern itself with the entire personality, rather than with patterns of thought or feeling in isolation. It implicates events throughout the lifespan in its understanding of pathogenesis. And its conception of the unconscious mind is correspondingly generous. From Erich Fromm to Jeremy Safran, psychoanalysts have tended to demonstrate a preference for Zen when making forays into the rich psychology of Buddhism. (Psychoanalysts such as the London psychoanalyst, Nina Coltart, who have been more engaged with the Therevadan
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Buddhist schools of South East Asia, are relative exceptions.) As such (and with the notable exception of Karen Horney) Zen-minded psychoanalysts have paid relatively little attention to ‘mindfulness.’ As we have already noted, although mindfulness permeates Zen in practice, it has not been one of its conceptual cornerstones. Of course, Freud’s own strictures on the analyst’s use of attention (the maintenance of ‘evenly hovering attention’ without leaping to conclusions – Freud 1912: 111) have been compared by many authors with the training of attention through meditation. It is important to state that Freud’s injunction, despite the apparent simplicity that Mel Miller (1999: 82) has noted, has been progressively distorted by his successors within psychoanalysis. In this way, instructions to suspend judgment and theorization were transformed into a justification for partial if apparently spontaneous interpretations on the part of the analyst (cf. Epstein 1984 for an elegant review). Although Bion undoubtedly opposed this tendency with his frequently quoted comments on the analyst’s need to suspend memory and desire, these do not fully represent Bion’s aim. As he comments: Freud . . . speaks of blinding himself artificially. As a method of achieving this artificial blinding I have indicated the importance of eschewing memory and desire. Continuing and extending the process, I include understanding and sense perception with the properties to be eschewed. The suspension of memory, desire, understanding, and sense impressions may seem to be impossible without a complete denial of reality; but the psycho-analyst is seeking something that differs from what is normally known as reality. (Bion 1970: 43) Bion’s goal therefore went well beyond Freud’s. We might say Bion is less interested in realizing our momentary experience in its fullness, than in transcending it in favor of a purely intuitive knowing. If Freud’s concept of the analyst’s attitude, however accidentally, manages to capture something that is close to the Buddhist ideal of mindfulness, Bion’s aspirations seem closer to a different spiritual tradition, the Vedanta of his own birthplace, India. Although psychoanalysis had already provided an important gateway between mindfulness and psychotherapy, the new therapies aligned to the cognitive-behavioral movement have been curiously forgetful of the example it set. This amnesia extends beyond the clinical influence of the therapist’s own attentiveness to the importance placed upon a personal training analysis in optimizing the analyst’s attention. When Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was first promoted as a form of psychological treatment (see below), the expectation that therapists should first experience and practice the program for themselves over an extended period was seen as a radical innovation, rather than a rediscovery of the role of the therapist’s own
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therapy. (Personal therapy has remained a core component of training in all the Western psychodynamic therapies deriving from Freud.) Sometimes the correspondence between a personal therapy and a personal training in mindfulness can be very close, as in Bryan Wittine’s account of the attention paid to immediate affective and bodily experience during therapy with James Bugantal (Wittine 2005). In this new therapeutic tradition, treatments are created for specific purposes (such as the relief of depression, shame, or self-harm). They integrate meditative techniques alongside structured exercises so that patients/clients may learn ‘mindfulness skills’ believed to confer specific benefits. This emphasis on named targets and structured process is much more compatible with the cognitive-behavioral tradition within Western psychotherapy than with psychoanalysis. ‘Mindfulness’ is fitted into this tradition by becoming a label for a process or set of processes by which interventions have planned therapeutic effects. A different language comes with this change. Therapies have components, procedures, and tool kits. Their terminology aspires to a clinical objectivity and ignores ambiguities (as well as their origins). In speaking of ‘mindfulness,’ they make little explicit reference to Buddhism, although these new healing technologies can be heavily indebted to it in their thinking and in their procedures. A sample list of these interventions can include: MBSR Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (Kabat-Zinn 1990) MBCT Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (Segal et al. 2002) MB-EAT Mindfulness Based Eating Awareness Training (Kristeller and Hallett 1999) DBT Dialectical Behavior Therapy (Linehan 1993) ACT Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes et al. 1999) CMT Compassionate Mind Training (Gilbert 2005). In MBSR and MBCT the majority, but not all, of the exercises that are taught are designed to foster ‘mindfulness.’ These can be divided into those that do so through formal practice, with an expectation that clients set time aside each day to repeat the exercise; and informal practice. In the latter, people deliberately bring a mindful attitude to bear on what they are doing, while continuing to be engaged in ordinary activities such as eating, running, or washing the dishes. The formal practices are essentially the same in either MBSR or MBCT, being based on attentional training through a ‘body scan’ (which develops attentional control and mindfulness of the body); sitting meditations (leading to mindfulness of the breath, the body, sounds, thoughts, and feelings); and mindful movement exercises (providing additional practice in being mindful of the breath, body, and surroundings). Students graduate towards meditation in which awareness is inclusive and undirected in
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‘choiceless awareness.’ Informal practice involves development of mindfulness across a range of experiences and situations between classes. Both of these differ from traditional teaching of meditation techniques in the frequent use of group discussions. In these discussions, students share responses to the exercises and articulate their increasing awareness of the interplay between bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts. All of these practices are linked in MBSR with exercises that aim to increase awareness of sources of subjective stress and their impact. In MBCT, particular attention is paid to mood and its relationship to thinking style. In either intervention, self-monitoring will be used for this, consistent with CBT techniques. In MBSR especially, some ‘loving kindness’ meditation may also be introduced, particularly if the course includes a silent retreat day towards its end. In a variant developed specifically for people subject to binge eating (MB-EAT), awareness of bodily cues to start and stop eating is highlighted, alongside practices to foster positive feelings of forgiveness towards oneself. Although DBT clients are expected to develop ‘mindfulness’, there is no explicit requirement that they do so through the traditional formal practices such as sitting or body meditations. Instead, the learning of ‘what’ and ‘how’ mindfulness skills is encouraged in the course of class exercises and group discussions, as well as through informal practices designed to develop a present-centered attitude within familiar situations that would otherwise simply be lived through on automatic pilot (see Anbeek and De Groot 1999: 199 for a summary of these). In ACT, a treatment developed from a very behavioral therapeutic philosophy, ‘mindfulness’ is used as a term to group techniques together, rather than for a state of mind or even a kind of awareness. Relevant techniques are categorized according to which of four ‘acceptance and mindfulness’ functions they fulfil, namely: contact with the present moment; acceptance; cognitive defusion; and self as context. (Two additional functions concern the therapy’s ‘commitment’ aspect.) Despite this reduction to component psychological tasks, we find three core components of mindfulness (being present, being non-judgmental, and nonidentification with thoughts) that are also common to the other treatments we have mentioned. In ACT, they are accompanied by a fourth mindful element: seeing the self as context (rather than as an object or individual). This lacks a clear counterpart in the other ‘mindfulness’ interventions. All four aspects of acceptance and mindfulness can be fostered through a wide selection of alternative techniques, within an individually tailored treatment program. At the therapist’s discretion, these can include meditation practice, but it is not seen as essential. CMT (Gilbert 2005) is an interesting example of a therapeutic approach whose own roots are close to those of mindfulness-based therapies. However, detoxification of negative thoughts and feelings, and acceptance of unpleasant experience, is encouraged through exercises intended to cultivate compassion
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for self and others. A variety of techniques are available. When they include meditation, there can be greater reliance on active visualization in order to stimulate positive states of mind than is typical of traditional ‘mindfulness’ meditations. A considerable range of styles is found across these and other mindfulnessbased interventions. They can be part of therapeutic packages promoting selfhealing through compassion and loving kindness, as well as programs that cultivate direct insight by paradoxical questioning and non-verbal methods. Their common links with Buddhism mean these therapies all place a value on qualities of attention that are rarely recognized in traditional Western psychotherapies. While this is just as central to, for instance, the deliberate development of compassion, it is most explicit in mindfulness therapies because ‘mindfulness’ is usually defined in terms of attention and awareness.
Technology and tradition I have used the provocative term ‘technology’ to refer to these interventions for several reasons. It draws attention to the peculiar terminology that is used for many kinds of psychological intervention in the West. Many psychological treatments have now been reduced to what may be termed MLAIs (Multi-Letter Acronym Interventions). MLAIs are usually denoted by their first letters only, so cognitive behavior therapy becomes CBT, interpersonal therapy IPT, and so on. It is a trend that is a frank imitation of ‘scientific’ drug treatments, tricyclic antidepressants having become TCAs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors SSRIs, and so on. This kind of shorthand is not applied to all psychological treatments – certainly not to the psychoanalytic psychotherapies, for instance – and it is probably significant whether or not a newcomer allows itself to be packaged and branded in this way. In general, psychological MLAIs tend to fit the drug metaphor more easily than other psychological therapies. They are more likely to have been researched, to have (at least some) manualized procedures, and to have an evidence-base concerning their efficacy with patients who share a particular diagnosis. Continuing research is also likely to be critically examining the intervention’s components, in order to understand which of these may be the most active in producing its effects and which might be inessential. Any one of these new mindfulness-based treatments, already styled as MLAIs, can, if taken in isolation, appear to fit with this vision of therapy. The most ‘Zennish’ of these, DBT, was introduced in a companion volume by Christa Anbeek and Peter De Groot (Anbeek and De Groot 1999). In contrasting DBT with Buddhist practice as interpreted by Keiji Nishitani, they noted essential differences because DBT appeared to be ego-enhancing when Nishitani was not. However, this difference may be enhanced because all of these treatments tend to be much more structured and goal-directed than, say, classical psychoanalysis. The paradox that Anbeek and De Groot
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recognized there, concerning the intention to build up rather than to weaken an organizing subjective self, may be an aspect of a more fundamental paradox to which any MLAI mindfulness-based healing technology will be subject. It concerns intentionality itself, and striving for a state of ‘letting be’ or ‘nondoing.’ A tension between striving and non-striving will be familiar to practitioners from a whole range of meditative traditions where expectations and intentions are likely to limit a student’s attainment. However, it gains in intensity if the vehicle for non-doing is a carefully structured program where, in addition to many indications that clients are supposed to get definite results from letting go, every session along the way is organised around its own aims and objectives. While there are important differences between them, the approaches we have been discussing here see mindfulness as a means – a step on the way to some treasured goal. This may be increased immunity from episodes of depression or some positive functional change like “construction of broad, flexible and effective repertoires” – a desired psychological outcome in ACT (Hayes 2004: 654). To the extent that they do this, these therapeutic approaches will differ from ones that value mindfulness as an intrinsically transformative activity in its own right. A good example of the latter can be found in statements by the psychoanalyst Nina Coltart: the teaching of Buddhism is what is called bhavana or the cultivation of the mind with the direct aim of the relief of suffering in all its forms, however small; the method and the aim are regarded as indissolubly interconnected; so it seems to me logical that neutral attention to the immediate present, which includes first and foremost the study of our own minds, should turn out to be our sharpest and most reliable therapeutic tool in psychoanalytic technique since there, too, we aim to study the workings of the mind, our own and others, with a view to relieving suffering. (Coltart 1992: 183) In the first section of this chapter I had tried to show how some of the richness attaching to the concept of mindfulness reflects ambiguities that make sense once it is put back into the context of the traditional enlightenment factors. In turn, some of the contradictions that arise when applying mindfulness as part of a healing technology can be better understood in the context of the traditional practices by which mindfulness is to be attained and perfected. A key text is the “four foundations of mindfulness” (Walshe 1987: 335–350). This sutta outlines an extraordinary progression of practices which progress from mindfulness of the body through mindfulness of feeling tone to instant acknowledgement of any state of mind for what it is, leading to mindfulness of the dhamma. In this last stage, unfolding awareness allows discrimination of the hindrances and aggregates that preface direct insight into the enlightenment factors. Although the sequence can have the appearance
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of exercises in a primer, it outlines a naturally progressing order, as the awakening mind falls back into itself in a movement that is probably too natural and too simple for the ordinary discursive mind to comprehend. This suggests that, even if the stated aims of a mindfulness-based healing technology are relatively modest, it will unleash processes whose fruits go well beyond those aims. I have been fortunate to be able to do some exploratory research into the experiences of people who have been practicing and teaching mindfulness a great deal of their adult lives. The kinds of emergent experiences that are prominent in these experienced practitioners – both a permeation of mindfulness as it extends in depth and continuity, as well as a profound and positive progression in affectivity – seemed to have just this naturally spontaneous character, and to be self-fulfilling (Mace 2006). Western psychological language is somewhat limited here, not only because it is far more developed as a tool for describing negative rather than positive experiences, but also because it makes it very difficult to describe this kind of development except in terms of states within a putatively continuous mind. The fact that these positive changes were observed among people who were very actively engaged in teaching and helping others raises a further dimension, one that is ignored by the technological stance. Perhaps this sort of psychological development is facilitated by a kind of ethical readiness? Mindfulness was originally practiced in a context where first morality, then mindfulness had to be cultivated before insight (and lasting liberation) would be possible. Or perhaps mindfulness promotes altruistic yearnings whose fulfilment contributes positively to its further development? In either case, these seem fundamental issues for contemporary attempts to foster psychological health and well-being that cannot be ignored. One further element in the cultivation of mindfulness, which a technological stance tends to ignore, is the figure of the teacher. Quite different attitudes will be found between the interventions that have been introduced here. In MBSR, for instance, there has been a strong insistence on the teacher’s ability not only to experience mindfulness at first hand in order to develop it in others, but also to embody it as a living demonstration that students could internalize. Conversely, those technologies that place less emphasis on guided meditations, including DBT, either emphasize the importance of their tools rather than the instructor, or imply that students should be free to choose their own practices with a minimum of interference from others (even if others have far greater experience). These vacillations are mirrored in disagreements about the role of personal experience that continue to divide the psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral traditions within Western psychotherapy. But, as exhibited across the new mindfulness-based interventions, their contradictoriness and gravity can make more sense if these stances are seen as different ways of coping with the question of transmission of Buddha nature. In traditional Buddhist practice, progression in the dhamma usually depends upon contact with a teacher who provides teaching only after he or she is
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given permission to do so by his or her own teacher. Referring to this succession as transmission of ‘Buddha nature’ is a reminder that, in principle, a chain of spiritual descent can be traced back through a teacher to the Buddha himself. From this perspective, there should be little conflict between the recognition this confers and actual attainments. In practice, tensions between authority based upon pedigree, respecting the impeccability of a teacher’s credentials as a guarantee of attainment, and one based upon presence, where the quality of his or her awareness is paramount, irrespective of lineage and practice, can be considerable. (Crook [1997], while siding with the former position, illustrates this issue well.) When practices are taken up in a clinical context, this question of transmission can therefore either be recognized and accommodated – by arrangements that acknowledge and highlight the impact of the consciousness of one person on the next – or it can be denied. The question was already alive while the Buddha was walking the Earth. None of the Buddhist traditions that have followed has been untouched by it. As with the other questions that have been raised here, it is possible that, with the continuing emergence of new mindfulness-based healing technologies, they might move beyond enactments of such ancient dilemmas, towards providing an arena for their resolution.
References Anbeek, C. and De Groot, P. (1999) ‘Buddhism and psychotherapy in the West: Nishitani and dialectical behaviour therapy,’ pp. 187–204 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge. Austin, J. H. (1998) Zen and the Brain, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bion, W. (1970) Attention and Interpretation, London: Tavistock. Coltart, N. (1992) ‘Attention,’ pp. 176–193 in N. Coltart (ed.) Slouching Towards Bethlehem, London: Free Association Books. Crook, J. (1997) ‘Authenticity and the practice of Zen,’ pp. 221–245 in J. Pickering (ed.) The Authority of Experience: Essays on Buddhism and Psychology, Richmond, UK: Curzon. Epstein, M. (1984) ‘On the neglect of evenly suspended attention,’ Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16, 193–205. Freud, S. (1912) ‘Recommendations for physicians on the psycho-analytic method of treatment,’ in Standard Edition volume 12, London: Hogarth. Gilbert, P. (2005) Compassion, London: Brunner-Routledge. Goleman, D. (1988) The Meditative Mind, New York: Putnam. Hanh, T. N. (1991) The Miracle of Mindfulness, London: Rider. Hayes, S. C. (2004) ‘Acceptance and commitment therapy, relational frame theory, and the third wave of behavioural and cognitive therapies,’ Behaviour Therapy, 35, 639–665. Hayes, S., Strosahl, S. and Wilson, K. (1999) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, New York: Guilford. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990) Full Catastrophe Living, New York: Delta.
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Kristeller, J. and Hallett, C. (1999) ‘An exploratory study of a meditation-based intervention for binge eating disorder,’ Journal of Health Psychology, 4, 357–363. Linehan, M. M. (1993) Cognitive-Behavioural Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, New York: Guilford. Mace, C. (2006) ‘Long-term impacts of mindfulness on psychological well-being: new findings from qualitative research,’ pp. 255–269 in A. Delle Fave (ed.) Dimensions of Well-Being, Milan: Franco Angeli. —— (2007) Mindfulness and Mental Health: Therapy, Theory and Science, London: Routledge. Miller, M. (1999) ‘Zen and psychotherapy: From neutrality, through relationship, to the emptying place,’ pp. 81–92 in P. Young-Eisendrath and S. Muramoto (eds) Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy, Hove, UK: BrunnerRoutledge. Morgan, W. and Morgan, S. (2005) ‘Cultivating attention and empathy,’ pp. 73–90 in G. Germer, R. Siegal, and P. Fulton (eds) Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, New York: Guilford. Segal, Z., Williams, J. and Teasdale, J. (2002) Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression, New York: Guilford. Thera, N. (1994) The Vision of Dhamma (2nd ed.), Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society. Walshe, M. T. (trans.) (1987) ‘Maha¯ sattipattha¯ na Sutta: A translation of the Digha Nikaya,’ pp. 335–350 in The Long Discourses of the Buddha, Boston, MA: Wisdom. Wittine, B. (2005) ‘The I and the self: Reminiscences of existential-humanistic psychotherapy,’ pp. 114–128 in J. Geller, J. Norcross, and D. Orlinsky (eds) The Psychotherapist’s Own Psychotherapy, New York: Oxford University Press.
Chapter 15
Dying to be born Transformative Surrender within analytical psychology from a clinician’s perspective Gordon Wallace
Introduction A simple dream which has not left my memory, even with the passage of many years, became the genesis of my work with Transformative Surrender: I am with a group of followers in a large wood framed building which is empty of furnishings except for a glass display case. The male leader of the group, unable to continue living his life as he had, sweeps his arm through the case, smashing his trophies and icons of achievement to the ground. Weeping deeply, he buries his head in his hands and falls to his knees. With no awareness or sense of control over where his life will now lead, feelings of despair as well as resignation fill him as the building explodes into flames. Within Western culture, my dream-ego’s action of relinquishing a lifetime of achievement could not be seen as a constructive and beneficial deed. In fact, within most Western schools of psychology, this behavior would be denounced as heresy for it is antithetical to accepted and desired psychotherapeutic goals of increasing personal power, strengthening ego functioning, and helping clients to take charge of their lives. However, when individuals run out of personal coping strategies, when their ego functioning is essentially paralyzed, when they have euphemistically hit bottom, the experience of surrender is one of the few, though painful, therapeutic events which may occur. Professional and academic psychology (including analytical psychology) has often ignored, misunderstood, or maligned the critical experience of surrender within human growth and development. In this chapter I will argue that surrender is a necessary portal to deepening psycho-spiritual development. In presenting this chapter, my intention as a clinician is to champion surrender, the unwanted child of psychology. It is an attempt to begin addressing the neglect which surrender has suffered, establish its legitimacy, and affirm its rightful place within a theory of adult development. In order to present a
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more discriminating concept and understanding of this critical initiatory experience, I believe it is constructive to move outside traditional Western psychology and religion and explore non-dualistic traditions such as Buddhism and Mysticism.
Analytical psychology’s individuation Central to Jung’s concept of individuation is a transformation of the ego– Self dynamic. This specifically requires a letting go by the ego of its belief in its centrality and supremacy to allow a meaningful dialogue to be initiated and maintained between ego and Self. However, within analytical psychology, the need for self-sacrifice or surrender in the service of individuation has not always been openly received or easily accepted. Within the professional literature, it has been largely ignored, or even vilified, as an unwanted or, at the very least, unwelcome, developmental task. Asher describes this antipathy toward the concept of surrender: As has been stated ad nauseam in psychological literature, the ego must die, be defeated for something new to be born, the self to be victorious. Not only is this militaristic imagery – defeat, victory – problematic, it’s at best crudely relevant to the complexity of psychological life. (Asher 1993: 88) In this reading, our wills, our conscious intentions, are to be defeated by the self, or more broadly unconscious forces, especially the numinous archetypal constellations . . . by and large, the Jungian community has been held hostage by the power dynamics of self/ego interactions – often imaged as two entities continuously at war. (Asher 1993: 92) They further characterize the ego, because of its need to surrender, as experiencing “shame, guilt and inferiority. Healing as surrender to this God/self concept only contributes to another round of ego/self contentiousness. Naturally the ego rebels” (Asher 1993: 90). A negative understanding and conceptualization of surrender, I suggest, began with Jung’s own description of the individuation process: “From this we can see the numinous power of the self, which can hardly be experienced in any other way. For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego” (CW 14: para 778, original emphasis). While Jung’s writings specifically note the important role the ego plays in the individuation process, that it must still go through a negatively connoted surrender process (including the outcome of being defeated) remains obscure to many.
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My view is that militaristic connotations of ‘the battle between the ego and Self,’ as well as creating a dichotomous image of victor versus vanquished, winner versus loser, oversimplifies the individuation process. However, in advocating a renewed imagining of surrender, I am not promoting a sanitized or depotentiated version. I recognize that the encounter with the archetypal energies of the Self is a powerful event which significantly changes the ego. In addition, as the Self is an archetype, it represents a totality with both positive and negative, good and evil, constructive and destructive energies in potential. The outcome of an encounter with the Self is not guaranteed to be benevolent or positive.
Surrender within psychological experience A prominent feature of surrender involves the action of giving up or letting go of aspects of one’s functioning. Much of the early psychological interest in the concept of surrender arose from Twelve-Step treatment programs for addictions. These have as a central therapeutic feature the need to let go of ego-centered control. From clinical experience, I believe there is a particular type of surrender both central and unique to psychological development. A conceptual definition of this specific form of surrender could have four distinct qualities:
• • • •
the act of letting go or giving up aspects of one’s self in order to maintain or re-establish a transpersonal relationship undertaken in a non-volitional manner without foreknowledge of the actual outcome.
This definition is comprehensive, capturing multiple facets of surrender. I propose to call it Transformative Surrender to distinguish it from other forms and expressions, and to avoid confusing and conflicting the terms surrender, sacrifice, and submission. Key concepts in this definition include the image of movement through yielding, offering, or giving up some aspect of our individuality from our usual way or sense of being. From an analytical perspective, what is critical is letting go or giving up the ego’s false belief in its centrality. This need to give up something important to us “appears to be indispensable for individuation, for the salvation of the soul” (Guggenbuhl-Craig 1977: 109). The second major element of my definition rests upon the etymological derivation of the concept of surrender. The Old French word surrendre is made up of both “sur (over) and rendre (give back)” (Barnhart 1995: 782). Therefore, the original meaning of this concept was not only ‘to give,’ but specifically to ‘give back over.’ This implies a return to a concept or entity with which the giver had an earlier relationship. I believe this critical element supposes there is an intent in the act to re-establish or maintain a relationship
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considered transpersonal in nature. It assumes human beings possess potentialities surpassing the limits of the maturely developed ego. The relationship is with a transcendent Other or, from a nondualistic perspective, arises as individuals experience their existing identity as having a seamless connection with all of consciousness. This goes by many names depending upon the belief system within which it is experienced. For my purposes it can be summarized as being a sense of Self, God or one’s True Nature. Surrender is, therefore, as Jay (1992) has noted, an attempt at atonement. The original meaning of the term is to experience at-one-ment between the person and the transpersonal. All psychological change requires a giving up or letting go of maladaptive beliefs and/or behaviors. My definition of a particular form of surrender suggests the goal is not returning to an earlier stage of psychological development or to an advance to an idealized sense of Self, but rather to a greater concept than one’s own sense of ego or Self. Analytical psychology is a depth psychological theory which embodies the process of Transformative Surrender. Jung’s concept of the Self as an a priori ordering and structuring principle within the psyche clearly places it within a transpersonal realm. The third key element of my definition is a critical one. The act of surrender is a nonvolitional one beyond the control of the rational ego. This removes transformative surrender from being a religious work. Organized religions have well-developed rituals, including the concepts of sacrifice and surrender, developed over millennia literally evoking the surrender of an individual before a transpersonal Other. A critical defining feature of my understanding of Transformative Surrender is it cannot be consciously brought about. Conditions can be implemented to assist in its birth, but it is beyond the conscious control of the ego. Hidas eloquently summarizes the nonvolitional features of surrender occurring independently of control by the rational, ego-bound mind: Surrender involves a leap, a push, a giving-up, an abandonment of hope, a cleansing through painful purgation for which no exclusively rational process can substitute. Hence, surrender comes over one in a wave, when reason, will and knowledge are no longer adequate to sustain self-directed life. (Hidas 1981: 30) The fourth and last component of my definition of surrender is an action entered into without knowing whether the outcome will be positive or negative. It is often imagined as either an act of blind faith or of desperation one hopes will result in spiritual and psychological growth. The actual outcome is not known before the surrender occurs. Surrender therefore always involves a degree of vulnerability and risk. If one knew with certainty what the
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outcome would be, it would not be entering into, or re-connecting with the transpersonal, rather, would be limited to an ego-oriented system.
Transformative Surrender experience In addition to re-imagining surrender, as a clinician I believe the experience of undergoing Transformative Surrender within therapy needs to be reexamined. The differential concepts of surrender ‘to’ as opposed to surrender ‘of ’ provide a simple yet effective framework to explore what actually transpires. Fisher (1983) divides the surrender ‘to’ literature into three groups characterized as surrendering to:
• • •
a higher self limitations and finiteness experience.
Common to each ‘surrender to . . .’ concept is the image of movement. Specifically this is a movement from understanding the individual and his or her world through a narrow and myopic lens offered solely by the ego, to a more expansive view offered by an Other – whether the Other be experience, human frailty and limitations, or a higher power seen as transcendent. If the underpinning of these surrender experiences is dialectic, this uses an either/or logical operator, and suggests the movement is instantaneous. One is either viewing and experiencing the world through the ego or through an other/ Other, with the individual’s psychological center instantly altered. This is readily observed in religious conversion experiences; perspectives are dramatically flipped with a powerful immediacy. ‘Surrender of . . .’ can be either letting go of an old sense of self or giving up psychological defences (Fisher 1983). Although the distinction between these two concepts is subtle, they help us understand that a hard and rigid personality core which stifles growth has to be surrendered for our potential to be realized. This also implies movement. Instead of it being an either/or position, it imagines opening to a metaphorical space. Here, neither ego nor Self is in control. It is a threshold, a liminal space which is neither here nor there, that is ‘between’ (Mathers 2001: 96). Imagine the moment at the apex of a pendulum’s arc when it is still, immediately preceding descent, the moment immediately after exhalation of breath and preceding inhalation. ‘Surrender of . . .’ leads to an emptiness where no-thing is the center. This experience, ‘surrender of . . . ,’ effectively captures the essence of Transformative Surrender. While Jung (CW: 9ii) suggests Christianity provides the best tradition by which to explore and understand individuation, I believe Buddhist and Mystical writings can serve us in understanding Transformative Surrender. His own extensive use of Eastern and Mystical material to illustrate and support his theories provides a precedent for using these resources.
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It is, however, also important to emphasize here that by using concepts from nondualistic belief systems such as Buddhism and Mysticism, I am not attempting to reify them in order to fit Jungian concepts; my intent is to incorporate their evocative and expressive qualities to illustrate and understand my conceptualization of Transformative Surrender.
Surrender, emptiness, and nothingness The image of emptiness as expressed through Eastern religious traditions aptly portrays the Transformative Surrender experience. Taoism offers a vivid understanding of the value of emptiness or non-existence: Thirty spokes converge on a hub but it’s the emptiness that makes a wheel work. Pots are fashioned from clay but it’s the hollow that makes a pot work. Windows and doors are carved for a house but it’s the spaces that make the house work. Existence makes something useful but non-existence makes it work. (Lao-Tzu, cited in Miller and Kenedi 2000: 102) While I believe Buddhism offers a perspective to better understand a moment of emptiness arising from the Transformative Surrender experience, this is an exceedingly difficult concept for Westerners to comprehend. However, contrary to Western ideas, emptiness from a Buddhist perspective does not mean annihilation or a vacuous non-entity (Epstein 1998; Watson 1998). Rather, it serves as a starting place within Buddhism for self-exploration, a beginning referred to as ‘unknowing.’ These moments of unknowing, when the “mind is loosened from its moorings” (Epstein 1998: 46), are said to be special opportunities for realization. As Batchelor notes: To experience emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who you are and the kind of reality you inhabit. It may only last a moment before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for the moment, we witness ourselves and the world as open and vulnerable. (Batchelor 1997: 80) The image of this moment of emptiness and unknowing is, in my view, the key to a more discriminating understanding of Transformative Surrender. Rather than surrender being a clash of wills with the ego being crushed and defeated, it can be imagined as an entry to the unfolding of an individual’s
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growth and development arising through the ego’s awareness of its relationship to the Self. To be contained within this moment of unknowing is to be still; it is a moment not lodged in the past or living in the future, heralding new possibilities or potentials which resonate with the etymological meaning of the Buddhist word for emptiness, sunyata, as “a pregnant void, the hollow of a pregnant womb” (Epstein 1995: 190). This concept of a sense of emptiness that is paradoxically pregnant presents an image of unbounded potentials and possibilities which as yet have not been realized or, to continue the sunyata metaphor, born. In Mahayana Buddhism, sunyata creates wisdom, or at least the possibility of wisdom. It allows for a cessation of “the projections of our mind’s ego patterns” (Jaoudi 1998: 11). Suzuki further notes the critical importance of sunyata on the unique development of an individual’s life: Every minute of human life, as long as it is an expression of its inner self, is original, divine, creative, and cannot be retrieved. Each individual life thus is a great work of art. Whether or not one makes it a fine inimitable masterpiece depends upon one’s consciousness of the working of sunyata within oneself. (Suzuki 1957: 31) Mystical thought (especially within Christian-oriented writings) also understands the concept of emptiness as being critical to union with the transpersonal Other although it often phrases it in terms of ‘nothingness.’ Mysticism emphasizes that God is not understood with the intellect, but rather is intuitively known when thoughts are absent: “Mystical prayer is emptying the mind so that we may directly experience Consciousness itself; the nothingness that contains everything” (Freke 1998: 44). The fourteenthcentury German mystic known as Tauler concluded that union with God arose through “a fathomless sinking in a fathomless nothingness” (cited in Underhill 1999: 400). Meister Eckhart succinctly summarizes the Transformative Surrender experience of nothingness: I once had a dream. I dreamt that I, even though a man, was pregnant, pregnant and full with Nothingness like a woman who is with child. And out of this Nothingness God was born. We are all meant to be mothers of God. (as cited in Fox 1983: 71)
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The images representing the concepts of emptiness, sunyata, and the unknown are no strangers to psychological theories of development. It is often necessary to translate them since they are usually clothed in other than religious terms. References to these concepts in the literature help illuminate my revised imagining of the process of Transformative Surrender from a psychological perspective. In an overview, Epstein concludes: “the actions of a person who has understood emptiness bear the uncanny resemblance to what we in the West expect from those who have a highly developed sense of self ” (Epstein 1995: 72). Hall (1986) notes that the concept of sunyata, or emptiness, is suggestive of the Jungian objective psyche, an indescribable field of possibilities out of which the world is constructed. Jung, when writing about the unconscious, offers: “We call the unconscious ‘nothing,’ and yet it is a reality in potentia” (CW 9i: para 498). Although Jung’s published academic works do not elucidate a specific conceptualization of emptiness within psychological development, in a letter written in 1955, he can be seen to parallel the understanding of emptiness I offer, arising within a Transformative Surrender experience: With the increasing approximation to the centre there is a corresponding depotentiation of the ego in favour of the influence of the ‘empty’ centre, which is certainly not identical with the archetype but is the thing the archetype points to . . . so we can describe the ‘emptiness’ of the centre as ‘God.’ Emptiness in this sense doesn’t mean ‘absence’ or ‘vacancy,’ but something unknowable which is endorsed with the highest intensity. If I call this unknowable the ‘self,’ all that has happened is that the effects of the unknowable have been given an aggregate name, but its contents are not affected in any way. (Jung 1975: 258) In the same letter of 1955, Jung described the organizing function of the Self as an empty center around which the multiple centers of subjectivity revolve and evolve: “The whole course of individuation is dialectical, and the so-called ‘end’ is the confrontation of the ego with the ‘emptiness’ of the centre” (1975: 259). Although his view of the outcome of Transformative Surrender is close to mine, he uses conflictual terms. While I agree there is considerable psychic energy released when entering into the archetypal image of emptiness or nothingness, I do not think it need be understood so confrontationally. Rather, the concepts of unknowing, emptiness, and sunyata offer alternative images of surrender which, I believe, are compatible with the continuing role the ego has in individuation. Re-imagining Transformative Surrender in this way within therapy extricates it from the negative connotations of ego needing to be defeated or crushed in order to establish and maintain relationship with the Self, allowing dialogue, as opposed to the image of a dictatorial monologue from the Self
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imposed on the ego. This is not the final goal of the individuation process. It is a critical step needed to introduce the process of differentiation within the individual. The ego–Self dialogue provides a crucible for the ego’s encounter with the shadow, as well as its contact with the deeper layers of the unconscious psyche through a developing relationship with contrasexual aspects of oneself. These stages of individuation reciprocally affect and influence ego and Self throughout the individual’s life, and could not happen without the ego’s Transformative Surrender experience. The surrender process is a natural and integral necessity for psychological development, imagined as a rhythm of movement including aspects of both birth and death. This movement is described by my title, Dying to be Born, the gerund ‘dying’ expressing both an imperative towards growth and wholeness, as well as the need for relinquishment, in order for transformative development to occur. The last stanza of Goethe’s poem entitled ‘The Holy Longing’ summarizes my imagining of the paradoxical role of birth and death involved here: And so long as you haven’t experienced This: To die and so to grow, You are only a troubled guest On the dark Earth. (cited in Bly 1995: 209)
References Asher, C. (1993) ‘The communitarian self as (God) ultimate reality,’ Spring, 54, 71–99. Barnhart, R. K. (1995) The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, New York: HarperCollins. Batchelor, S. (1997) Buddhism Without Beliefs, New York: Riverhead Books. Bly, R. (1995) The Soul is Here for its Own Joy, Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. Epstein, M. (1995) Thoughts Without a Thinker, New York: Basic Books. —— (1998) Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, New York: Broadway Books. Fisher, S. C. (1983) ‘Surrender in pastoral psychology: Towards a psychological understanding,’ unpublished dissertation, Boston University Graduate School. Fox, M. (1983) Meditations with Meister Eckhart, Rochester, VT: Bear & Company. Freke, T. (1998) The Wisdom of the Christian Mystics, Boston, MA: Journey Editions. Guggenbuhl-Craig, A. (1977) Marriage – Dead or Alive, trans. M. Stein, Zurich, Switzerland: Spring Publications. Hall, J. A. (1986) The Jungian Experience: Analysis and Individuation, Toronto, ON: Inner City Books. Hidas, A. M. (1981) ‘Psychotherapy and surrender: A psycho-spiritual perspective,’ The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 131(1), 27–32. Jaoudi, M. (1998) Christian Mysticism East and West: What the Masters Teach Us, New York: Paulist Press.
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Jay, N. B. (1992) Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jung, C. G. (1953–1973) Collected Works, eds Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and W. McGuire, 20 vols, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —— (1975) Letters Vol. 2: 1951–1961, ed. G. Adler, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mathers, D. (2001) An Introduction to Meaning and Purpose in Analytical Psychology, London: Routledge. Miller, J. and Kenedi, A. (eds) (2000) God’s Breath: Sacred Scriptures of the World, New York: Marlowe & Company. Suzuki, D. T. (1957) Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, London: Novello & Company. Underhill, E. (1999) Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, Oxford: One World. Watson, G. (1998) The Resonance of Emptiness: A Buddhist Inspiration for a Contemporary Psychotherapy, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press.
Part VI
Mysticism and spirituality
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Chapter 16
The experience of self in Zen and Christian mysticism Daisuke Shimizu
Ken Wilber’s ‘fundamental self ’ as ‘Mind/universe’ Ken Wilber, in his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wilber 1977), integrated the methods of contemporary psychotherapy and the guiding principles of Eastern spiritual praxis to produce a sound therapy for the emerging movement of transpersonal psychology. Wilber’s fundamental concern in The Spectrum of Consciousness is the dissolution of the opposition, or dichotomy, between self and not-self. This dissolution takes place by a process of the self taking in that which is not-self. This taking-in could be explained as the self subjugating the ‘different’ by identifying with that which is not-self, in an expansion of the self-identification process. At first glance this appears to be a movement in the opposite direction to that proposed by the founder of psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli – dis-identification – in which one frees oneself from the thought constructs which give rise to the image of self. However, in Wilber’s system the assimilation of that which is not-self (a process sometimes accompanied by great pain) promotes spiritual growth and a liberation from psychological stress. This process of assimilation begins with the self as ‘persona’ taking in the not-self ‘shadow’ to form the ego. Next, the self as ego assimilates the physical body to form the ‘centaur.’ The boundary between the centaur and the environment is then eliminated to form a transpersonal identity that in turn leads to unity consciousness. This assimilative movement of return to the fundamental self, involving the progressive elimination of the respective false dichotomies at each stage along the spectrum of consciousness, is called by Wilber the ‘involution’ of the mind, and described in the second half of The Spectrum of Consciousness. Involution contrasts with Wilber’s movement of ‘evolution’ (described in the first half of the book), in which the false dichotomies arise in the first place. According to Wilber, the mind evolves through the four stages from: 1 2
unity consciousness to centauric consciousness to
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ego consciousness to persona consciousness.
This is fuelled by the forces of dualism, repression, and projection. Evolution is the usual developmental process of self-formation; involution, leading back to the condition of fundamental unity, is fostered by modern Western psychotherapy and Eastern spiritual praxis. The unity consciousness that is the end goal of involution may be referred to as the all-inclusive ‘Mind’ (with a capital ‘M’), ‘Mind-Only,’ ‘universe,’ or ‘totality.’ Wilber’s fundamental emphasis in his ‘spectrum’ theory is the recovery of this all-inclusive Mind or Self. Unless one has had the experience of fundamental-self-as-universe, therefore, one cannot truly understand the essential principle that ties together Wilber’s system of thought. The ultimate reality at the foundation of the consciousness spectrum is that Mind is universe and universe is Mind. Let us express this complete unity of Mind and universe with the expression ‘Mind/universe.’ In this compound term, ‘Mind’ indicates the formless self, another expression for the fundamental self; ‘universe’ indicates the sum total of all individual objects. These individual objects are, just as they are, the expression of Mind. This ultimate reality being beyond all words and concepts, Zen often refers to it simply as shako (lit., ‘this’). Both Zen and Christian mysticism identify as the core of their traditions the experience of the Source that is inexpressible in any way than with an indirect reference like ‘this.’ Wilber, however, in his discussion of the final stage of involution, describes only the unitive fusion of subject and object in the present moment, and does not speak of the clear and decisive experience of the world that takes place with the manifestation of individual objects as fundamental self.
The fundamental experience of Mind/universe The Zen experience of ‘formless self ’ In Zen it is said that Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment when, after sitting for seven days under the bodhi tree, he saw the morning star on the dawn of the eighth day. Yamada Mumon Roshi (1900–1988), one of the greatest modern Zen Masters, commented that at the moment of seeing the star Shakyamuni felt, “Ah! It is me that is shining!” (Yamada Mumon 1965: 124). In other words, the morning star manifested as the fundamental self, which was itself the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. Yamada Mumon also said of his own awakening experience: One day on my way back from sanzen I caught sight of the bright yellow gingko tree in front of the main hall and jumped in surprise as my mind
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suddenly opened. [My concentration on the koan] ‘Mu’ exploded, and a marvellous world appeared before me. (Yamada Mumon 1965: 95) The gingko tree had manifested before him as the fundamental self. Wilber’s experience of the world of Mind/universe, where Mind is universe and universe is Mind, is referred to in Zen as satori (realization) or kensho (seeing self-nature). The ‘seeing’ of kensho is not a seeing into the inner mind or subjective consciousness in the usual sense of these terms, but rather the realization that the outer world is the self. Each and every object in the outside world presents as the pure self which transcends all material forms and is therefore called in Zen ‘the formless self ’ or ‘the Original Face.’ This is the source mind, the pure consciousness which results from the transformation of the seed or storehouse consciousness (alaya-vijana). This, according to the Buddhist Yogacara school, is the eighth and deepest level of consciousness, out of which all of samsaric existence arises. Another term for this experience is issai genjo (all things manifesting just as they are). The ‘self ’ at issue here is the source of the universe which manifests with the ten thousand things. In Zen this aspect is referred to by the term shinku myou (truly empty, yet mysteriously existent – the mysterious manifestation of existence from the ultimate reality of absolute emptiness). Yamada Mumon is not the only Zen figure to interpret satori in terms of the experience of issai genjo and shinku myou. D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), for example, as a young man experienced his first kensho as an intuition of oneness with the towering trees at the temple Engaku-ji, where he trained in Kamakura. The initial awakening of the Zen thinker Akizuki Ryumin (1921–1999) occurred when he saw a young clerk polishing the windows of a bookstore and suddenly felt it was he himself who was doing the polishing. Zen Masters in charge of guiding and testing young trainees seldom speak openly of their own kensho experiences, fearing, perhaps, their disciples, not yet awakened themselves, will simply try to imitate what the Master has described. They may also wish to de-emphasize the experience, as the higher stages of Zen training involve eliminating the ‘smell’ of enlightenment. Nevertheless, countless Zen koans do in fact take up kensho as the experience of opening to the truth, and point to what this truth involves. For example, in the koan collection Shumon Kattoshu there is a case entitled ‘The Sound of the Wood Is Not Something Other.’ One day when Yongming Yanshou was in the assembly under Tiantai Deshao he was working with the monks. Hearing some firewood fall to the ground, he had a clear awakening. He said: The sound of the wood is not something other; My surroundings are not outside things.
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Mountains, rivers, and the great earth All reveal the Dharma King’s body. (Kirchner 2004: 145) This koan describes a representative kensho experience, stressing the themes of equality, the non-duality of inside and outside, and the all-inclusiveness of self. The monk, hearing the firewood fall, was awakened to the formless self. Do¯ gen (1200–1253), founder of the Japanese Soto school, expressed the same realization with the words (Genjo Koan, Shobogenzo): To learn the Buddha Way is to learn oneself. To learn oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be confirmed by all things. When there is no ego, then all things are the true self. That is, when self as ego ceases going beyond its true limits, all things in the surrounding world manifest as the fundamental self. This self, the formless self that manifests as all things, is that which is active in the intellectus agens (active intellect) spoken of by the medieval European philosophers. All is the function of this activity, and for this very reason it is usually impossible to recognize it, just as the eye cannot see itself. This is what Wilber refers to as ‘the blind spot of the universe.’ The experience of outside things manifesting as the formless self is precisely the same as the experience of that which you believed to be internal undergoing a reversal to become that which is external and surging back in upon you. The great ninth-century Chinese Zen Master Changsha Jingcen expressed this experience with the words, “The entire universe is your eye. The entire universe is your complete body” (Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo 1924–1932: 274a). The first of these statements expresses the same understanding as the famous saying of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), “The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me” (Quint 1977: S. 216). Once, at the end of a lecture, D. T. Suzuki posed an enigmatic question to his American audience: “When God created heaven and earth,” he asked, “who was watching?” After the audience had sat in puzzled silence for several moments, Suzuki said, “I was watching.” The ‘I’ of which Suzuki spoke was the formless self. Another religious figure whose teaching implicitly referred to the ‘total manifestation’ (issai genjo) of the formless self was the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), known for recommending examination of the question ‘Who am I?’ to all who sought his teaching. Ramana Maharshi once described his understanding of the self in the following manner: “The Self itself is the world; the Self itself is ‘I’; the Self itself is God; all is Siva, the Self ” (Maharshi 1988: 8). Maharshi’s ‘Self ’ may also be seen as an expression of the traditional Indian concepts of Atman
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and Brahman, which the Upanishads point to with the statement, ‘Thou art that.’ The experience of the formless self can be thought of as a variety of ‘peak experience,’ as described by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow (1908–1970). In Maslow’s view, peak experiences are not confined to religious seekers, but are available to anyone. Many ordinary people have such awakenings and go silently on to reconstruct their attitude toward the world and the way they relate to other people. Why, then, is the fundamental activity of the universe so intimately experienced as nothing other than self, as none other than ‘me’? This is because the source of the universe is the closest possible thing to us. We are, in the profoundest depths of our minds, already identified with the activity of the universal source that gives us our very lives; at an unconscious level, this activity is our essence, our true self. In the depths of our being there is a foundational level that is divine in nature. That human consciousness comprises an unconscious multilayered structure of this type is the basic standpoint of Wilber’s ‘spectrum of consciousness’ theory. In the experience of enlightenment, the true, formless self in the depths of our mind reveals itself as the things of the world, and thus is able to emerge into consciousness. Why does Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness end at the level of Mind/ universe? Is it not possible to hypothesize the existence of a level of the spectrum even more foundational? The answer is no – the Mind/universe is the spectrum’s most basic foundation, because Mind/universe is the self. Human beings are inherently moved to a spiritual search for the source of all existence, their own as well as that of the universe. Until we discover that source, a relentless existential angst drives us to continue seeking. However, what if, after hard searching, one day we suddenly awaken to a fundamental self that forms the ground of self and world and is immanent in all that exists? Our search would have to end there. The self that was searching for the ground of the self discovered it precisely because that ground was the very self that was searching. The source of the world/self was always present right there as self – there was nothing to seek. One result of the fundamental experience of the formless self is the certainty that ‘though I die, I am not dead.’ Though the ego dies and disappears together with the physical body, I, as formless self, continue to exist together with all things. This is simply an awakening to the obvious fact that though I die, the universe survives. This experience removes the fear of death and gives rise to an enormous upwelling of hope. Moreover, this experience leads to a resolution of the age-old philosophical dispute between the materialists and the idealists. When we awaken to the fundamental awareness that the source of all things is the formless self, we can no longer doubt that the basic fabric of the universe is not material, but consciousness, spirit, or mind. This also makes clear the superior range of psychology among the various sciences, because psychology recognizes that
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psychological phenomena are reality and does not have to demonstrate a material basis for them. Through this experience we can expect a truly balanced view of transpersonal psychological phenomena in particular. The primary effect of the fundamental experience of the formless self upon the one who has experienced it is a removal of all prejudicial thought. You see the formless self in whoever you look at. Gender prejudice weakens especially easily, for you come to regard all people as possessing the same psychospiritual existence as yourself. A selfless love arises, and you have the desire to live not for yourself but for others. You see surrounding objects as no different from yourself, so you naturally treat your food and possessions with the same consideration with which you treat yourself. You become more careful about things, and more capable of accepting them just as they are. The light of your presence promotes a gradual healing of even your deepest traumas. When the fundamental Mind/universe spectrum level is held in conscious awareness, that alone suffices to bring about a dissolution of the mindevolution process driven by the forces of dualism, repression, and projection. Along with this comes a deepened understanding of your own psychology and that of others. This deepening is profoundly beneficial for life in society.
Christian mysticism and the experience of the Godhead In Christian mysticism, the experience corresponding to kensho in Zen, that of spiritual union with the ultimate source, takes the form of a clear feeling that ‘I am God,’ the ‘I’ in this case being the formless self, and ‘God’ being the universal source. The fundamental standpoint of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart may be expressed in the saying, ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.’ A similar statement by Eckhart is the already mentioned ‘The eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same: one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.’ To be sure, Eckhart’s manner of expression relativizes ‘God’ and ‘I’ into separate entities, but we can see how at their source – the nondual Godhead and the formless self – they are one and the same. Thus, when Christian mystics see God revealed in the ten thousand things, the God they see is not the relativized, objectified God, but God as Godhead, the divine nature that antecedes the separation of subject and object and corresponds to the formless self. One of the mystics who saw God as manifest in all existence was St John of the Cross (1542–1591), the great reformer of the contemplative Carmelite order. In the fourth stanza, fifth verse of his essay The Living Flame of Love, St John writes: The soul is conscious of how all creatures, earthly and heavenly, have their life, duration, and strength in him . . . what [the soul] understands
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of God, by his being all these things with infinite eminence, is such that it knows these things better in God’s being than in themselves. (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez 1991: 710) In his Spiritual Canticle St John speaks of the same insight in more poetic language: My Beloved, the mountains, and lonely wooded valleys, strange islands, and resounding rivers, the whistling of love-stirring breezes. (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez 1991: 46)
This, in different words, expresses the issai genjo and shinku myou experiences of Zen. Instead of the term ‘formless self,’ St John uses ‘Beloved.’ A more recent figure in the mystical tradition is Willigis Jaeger (1925–), a German Benedictine priest and founder of the Wurzburg School of Contemplation. Jaeger, interested in Christian mysticism from the time of his youth, found the contemplative tradition had virtually disappeared in the Catholic Church. He therefore traveled to Japan and practiced Zen meditation for six years, after which he returned to Germany and began an effort to revive Christian mysticism. Well known in Germany as the modern Eckhart, Jaeger says of Zen and Christian mysticism, “I, for my part, was only able to realize, as a result of many years of Zen practice, that Christian mysticism essentially teaches the same things as Zen” (Jaeger 2002: S.65 [German]; in English in Jaeger 2006: 36). Jaeger expresses the basic standpoint of his thought as, “He reveals himself in the tree as tree, in the animal as animal, in the person as person, and in the angel as angel” (Jaeger 2002: S. 84 f. [German]; in English in Jaeger 2006: 56). Here too we see an expression of the Zen experiences of issai genjo and shinku myou, the only difference being that Jaeger uses the word ‘God’ rather than the word ‘self ’ when speaking of the fundamental activity of the Mind/universe. A similar outlook can be seen in verse seventy seven of the Gospel of Thomas, where Christ is quoted as saying, “Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up a stone, and there you will find me.” Thus, the notion of a ‘universal Christ’ who manifests in all things can already be seen at the beginnings of the Christian era, and probably represents an indigenous teaching of Christianity.
The question of no-self When the formless self manifests as the universe in the dynamic of shinku myou, might this also be referred to as muga, ‘no-self ’? Muga is a translation
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of Anatman, the Sanskrit term for the basic Buddhist teaching that, ultimately, no Atman exists. How does this teaching relate to our position that the formless self is the true self, and is extremely close to the traditional Indian concept of Atman? Does this mean that the formless self, being Atman, does not correspond to no-self ? In Indian thought, the term Atman refers to an eternal, substantive soul or essence which remains undestroyed during the process of rebirth and redeath. However, this concept is interpreted quite differently in Buddhism and in traditional Indian thought, respectively. In Buddhism, the Atman is regarded as no more than an externalized version of the individual self or ego, and the teaching of Anatman constitutes a rejection of this concept of an eternal self. In contrast, the more traditional view in Indian thought is of the Atman as a manifestation of Brahman, the universal, unconditioned source. Therefore, might not the formless self correspond to this traditional concept of Atman? Although the concept of formless self is similar to the Buddhist concept of Atman-as-soul in that both are regarded as eternal, the eternity of the formless self is the eternity of ‘right here, right now,’ not the hypothesized eternal substantiality of the Atman-as-soul. Furthermore, the formless self which manifests in grasses, trees, and stones can hardly be regarded as possessing the type of individual memory imprinting that determines the rebirth of Atman-as-soul, and thus cannot be conceived of as participating in the samsaric cycle. (In any event, Shakyamuni Buddha, from his standpoint of Anatman, refrained from comment on the persistence or destruction of a ‘soul’ after death.) The formless self, therefore, cannot be thought of as corresponding to the Buddhist Atman-as-soul. However, the manifestation of the formless self can be seen as an experience closely corresponding to the traditional Indian experience of Atman as Brahman, transcending all individual souls. When Buddhism teaches ‘no-self ’ and negates the concept of Atman, it is negating not only the notion of an eternal, substantive soul that wanders ceaselessly in the world, but also, and more importantly, it is negating the very source that gives rise to this notion. In traditional Mahayana Yogacara thought, this source – the source of all delusion – is identified as the eighth consciousness, the alaya vijana or storehouse consciousness (in Jungian terms, the collective unconscious). As mentioned above, the alaya vijana does not correspond to the consciousness of the formless self, which is the pure consciousness that results when the alaya vijana is purified and transformed into the Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom. This purified consciousness, free of all the delusive influences of the alaya vijana, is the true consciousness of no-self. As anyone who has tried spiritual praxis knows, deliberate attempts to realize no-self are destined to failure when limited to the surface levels of consciousness. Unless one descends to the subconscious and transforms the very foundations of the concept of the individual self – in other words, unless
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one descends to and transforms the alaya vijana – there is no way to lessen our conscious attachments to the notion of an individual ego. Through the practices of concentration and emptying, the spiritual seeker moves from the levels of ordinary consciousness into the depths of the mind. It is in those depths where one contacts the alaya vijana in its state of silent stillness. This is a fascinating unitive experience, but it is not more than an encounter with the wellsprings of egotism and self-attachment. There is a danger, however, of mistaking the stillness of the alaya vijana for the fundamental self and of therefore seeking no further than this state. With regard to this danger, the aforementioned Zen Master Changsha Jingcen said in Case 12 of the koan collection Mumonkan: Those who seek the Way yet fail to realize the truth, Do so because they identify with the same discriminating mind they always had. Though this is the source of the endless cycle of birth and death, Deluded people mistake it for the true original self. The term ‘conscious mind’ refers here to the alaya vijana, which, as the verse says, is “the source of the endless cycle of birth and death.” It is only when the dark stillness of the alaya vijana is emptied and transformed that one can truly know no-self – the manifestation of formless self and the experience of the living universe. Changsha Jingcen, in Case 46 of the Mumonkan, expresses this transformation with the words, “Step from the top of a hundred-foot pole, and manifest your whole body throughout the ten directions of the world.” The mechanism of this deep transformation is still not understood, and we have made no more than a start at logically explaining how to precipitate the satori experience. The difficulty is that entire process lies outside of the realm of conceptual analysis. Resolving this will be one of the greatest challenges facing the developing field of transpersonal psychology.
References Jaeger, W. (2006) Mysticism for Modern Times: Conversations with Willigis Jaeger, trans. P. Shepherd, ed. C. Quarch, MO, Liguori: Liguori/Triumph. Kavanaugh, K. and Rodriguez, O. (1991) The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Kirchner, T. Y. (2004) Entangling Vines: Zen Koans of the Shumon Kattoshu, Kyoto: Tenryuji Institute for Philosophy and Religion. Maharshi, R. (1988) The Spiritual Teaching Of Ramana Maharshi, Boston and London: Shambhala. Quint, J. [Hrsg.] (1997) Meister Eckehart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, Muenchen 4, Predigt 13, S. 216.
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Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo [Taisho-ero New Edition of the Buddhist Canon] (1924–1932), volume 51, Tokyo: Taisho issaikyo kankokai. Wilber, K. (1977) The Spectrum of Consciousness, Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House. Yamada Mumon (1965) Te O Awaseru [Place Your Palms Together (in Prayer)], Tokyo: Shunjusha.
Chapter 17
Self/No-Self in the therapeutic dialogue according to Martin Buber’s dialogue philosophy Tamar Kron
In his preface to Hans Trub’s Healing Through Meeting, Martin Buber writes: “A soul is never sick alone, but there is always a Betweenness also, a situation between it and another existing being. The psychotherapist who has passed through the crisis may now dare to touch on this” (Buber 1957: 142). I myself passed through that kind of crisis while working with patients in a psychiatric hospital. Faced with the utter and abject loneliness of my patients, I found in Buber’s dialogue philosophy an answer and a meaning to my work. To the question ‘what is man?’ Buber (1961) answers that man’s uniqueness is in his ability to enter into dialogue with his fellow man. True dialogue takes place between one person and another, and not within any person, nor is it a sum of two individuals’ discourses. ‘I’ does not exist as an exclusive category; it cannot exist by itself, it has no meaning by itself. ‘I’ is always part of a relationship, either I–You or I–It. When the ‘I’ relates as I–It, it relates to the other partially, as an object of observation, analysis, exploitation, and utility. What distinguishes the dialogue, that which Buber calls the I–Thou relation, is relating to the other authentically, perceiving the other as whole and unique without making use of the other for the I’s own needs (Buber 1958a). In any genuine dialogue between two or more people, something is immediately created between them, an entity that is new, is common to both, did not previously exist and does not exist inside either one of them. Buber (1961) called this creation ‘das Zwischen’ in German, the original language in which he wrote, translated to ‘the Between’ in English. His name for the area within which this new entity emerged was ‘das Untermenschliches’ or ‘the Interhuman’ (Buber 1965). He also distinguished between ‘the Interhuman’ and ‘the Intrapsychic,’ by which he meant the individual’s inner world and which unsurprisingly includes most of the phenomena with which psychology deals. What is essential is not what goes on within the minds of the partners in a relationship but what comes to exist between them. Buber writes: “The inmost growth of the self does not take place, as people like to suppose today through our relationship to ourselves, but through being made present by the
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other and knowing that we are made present by him” (Buber 1965: 71). A further distinction was made between ‘the Interhuman’ and ‘the Interpersonal,’ a designation covering social processes that are not necessarily dialogic, such as observation, analysis, and exploitation. We could say, then, that ‘the Interhuman’ is the area in which the ‘third being’ is created. Buber writes: On the far side of the subjective, on this side of the objective, on the narrow ridge where I and Thou meet, there is the realm of ‘Between’. This reality, whose disclosure has begun in our time, shows the way, leading beyond individualism and collectivism, for the life of future generations. Here the genuine third alternative is indicated, the knowledge of which will help to bring about the genuine person again and to establish genuine community. (Buber 1961: 246) The meeting in the Interhuman is a very real one that takes place in the here and now, in what Buber terms ‘the common world.’ The common world encompasses the reality of our waking life in which we participate together as members of the human community. It is built of people’s everyday intentional turnings to each other in word and deed. Buber posits the common world in contrast to the tyrant collective on the one hand, and to the quest for pure individualism on the other: The common world is characterized by the dialogical quality of its relationships and by the inherent belongingness to a community of humans. It is only in an interhuman common reality that the dialogue can unfold. When the partners both give up their ego, meaning their I in the relation I–it, and are open and attentive to each other as to a Thou, thereby transforming their I, even if for just a moment – at that moment there will be a transition to the Interhuman or to the Between. The Between (Zwischen) is different from the potential for dialogue and even from the relationship itself. It does not erase the differences between an I and a Thou or close the gap between them; it merely bridges the gap by locating the special common ground of being in the real here and now, which is created with the transformation of the I in the relationship. The I–Thou meeting is not intended to last. Buber writes: “But this is the exalted melancholy of our fate, that every Thou in our world must become an It. . . . Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually to re-enter into the condition of things” (Buber 1958a: 16). But there is hope, as the occurrence of I–Thou between human beings is always also spiritual, and as such it is sustained even in face of the dynamics of alternations Between I–Thou and I–It in our daily life. The dual basic attitude that is destined to man, writes Buber, is carrying being in his person, wishing to complete it, and ever again going forth to meet worldly and
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above-worldly beings over and against him. One does not experience the spiritual by transcending mundane reality, but rather one enters the spiritual domain through an I–Thou meeting with an ‘otherness.’ The connectedness we feel in an I–Thou moment with another connects us with the ‘Eternal Thou,’ the spiritual. To focus on the I–Thou relationship, on the ‘Between,’ already moves us past the narrow concerns of our ego. Buber writes: Spirit in its human manifestation is a response of man to his Thou . . . Spirit is not in the I, but between I and Thou. It is not like the blood that circulates in you, but like the air in which you breath. Man lives in the spirit if he is able to respond to his Thou. . . . Only in virtue of his power to enter into relation is he able to live in the spirit. (Buber 1958a: 39) The spiritual is not that which transcends the human, but the everyday: “Man cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach Him through becoming human” (Buber 1958b: 42). Buber found in Hasidism and its teaching an expression of that attitude. Hasidism, which started around the middle of the eighteenth century as a popular communal mysticism, is still meaningful and vital as a teaching. For Buber the Hasidic teachings are interconnected with his Dialogue philosophy. Buber writes: [Hasidism] . . . set aside the walls separating the sacred and the profane, by teaching that every profane act can be rendered sacred by the manner in which it is performed . . . Hasidism did make manifest the reflection of the divine, the sparks of God that glimmer in all beings and all things, and taught how to approach them, how to deal with them, how to lift and redeem them and reconnect them with their original root. (Buber 1947: 3) Buber cites the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism: “All that man possesses conceals sparks which belong to the roots of his soul and wish to be elevated by him to their origin” (Buber 1958: 33). One does not need to be a scholar, or a sage, or a holy person to be able to do this – each one of us can actualize the sparks of God in his or her everyday life, here and now, and especially in relationship to the other as Thou, in dialogue. The roots of this idea are in the myth of Kabala, in the main doctrine of the creation of the world: Torat Hatzimzum – doctrine of contraction. The doctrine of Tzimzum (contraction, lessening, withdrawal of God’s light) is the basis of the Lurianic Kabala, as described by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572) known by the name Haari of Tzfat (Zafed). Haari’s interpretation of the Kabalistic text Zohar and his myth of creation, deconstruction,
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and restoration became a dominant source of influence on Hasidic thinking and value system. Haari described contraction and creation thus: In the beginning, a simple divine light filled the entirety of existence . . . When there arose in His simple will the desire to create the worlds, He contracted His light, withdrawing it to the sides and leaving a void and an empty space in its center, to allow for the existence of the worlds. He then drew a single line of his infinite light into the void to illuminate the worlds . . . (Haari [as recorded by Rabbi Chaim Vital, 1863–1898 CE]: Etz HaChaim, Shaar Hahakdamot 4) The Hasidic teaching understands contraction as concealment of God’s light for the sake of revelation. The metaphor for this process is that of a ‘Father’ or ‘Teacher’ who must contract, conceal his light, his brilliance, his knowledge, and understanding in order to relate to his child or student and enter into a mutual relationship, a dialogue that will start a developmental process in that student. The next stage of creation, according to Lurianic Kabala, is the formation of a primordial form of human being in the line of infinite light drawn into the vacated space. This form is an archetype, the Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Man. Lights flashing from the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears of the Primordial Man emanate the 10 archetypal Sefirot, archetypal spiritual worlds, and basic elements of all creations. These lights, the Sefirot, were the vessels (Kellim) to contain the further emanations of the infinite light. But alas, the lower of the 10 vessels, those further away from the source, could not contain this brilliant light, and broke down. This is the cosmic catastrophe known as ‘The breaking of the vessels.’ The broken vessels held within them sparks of the emanated light, which as they fell were covered in darkness from the Shadow side. The coverings, known as ‘Kellipot,’ are like coarse crusts or scales. Our reality, our world is formed of the broken vessels covered completely with dark forces, but holding deep inside them sparks of the spiritual light. According to Hasidism, the task of every one of us is to extract and redeem those sparks, so as to restore the spiritual light in our world. This process is named ‘Tikkun’ – mending, or restoration of the world. Each encounter and each life event is an opportunity to raise a spark of holy light. The Hasidic doctrine of Tikkun holds that each moment in a person’s life presents an opportunity to ‘raise the sparks’ that only he or she can redeem. Now we can go back to the words of the Ba’al Shem Tov cited by Buber, and understand their deep meaning: that each person can uncover and redeem the sparks at each time and through each action. Martin Buber, following Hasidism, saw in the I–Thou relationship, in entering into dialogue, an act of Tikkun, redeeming of the sparks in both partners and in the world.
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The relations described between one human being and another may be applied to therapist–patient and supervisor–supervisee relations. While it is true that therapeutic or supervision frameworks are not relationships of symmetry and that there are limits to the reciprocity between the participants, it is nevertheless possible to attain dialogue in such an encounter (Kron 1991). Buber writes: “Healing, like education is only possible to the one who lives ever against the other and yet is detached. Every I–Thou relationship . . . persists in virtue of a mutuality which is forbidden to be full” (Buber 1958a: 134). Buber calls that kind of mutuality in the therapist–patient relationship that can be partial without losing immediacy and authenticity, by the name Inclusion (Buber 1961: 123–124). Inclusion in therapy is the readiness to enter the Between, enter into dialogue with our patient. Inclusion has its rules and boundaries. It is not dependent on atmosphere or feelings. It is an attitude that has also to be expressed in behavior. The first element of Inclusion is “a relation” (Buber 1961: 124), meaning a dialogical relationship. It is enabled whenever patient and therapist meet as two human beings, beyond the specific professional definition of their encounter. This possibility does not run counter to the asymmetrical condition of the therapeutic situation, for it is the therapist who can facilitate the occurrence of the dialogue – or inhibit it. In his essay ‘Elements of the Interhuman,’ Buber distinguishes between people who bring their ‘being’ to the encounter with others and those who bring to it only their ‘seeming’ (Buber 1965). One bringing his or her ‘being’ is spontaneous, open, attentive, and less concerned with perceived image, or his or her persona. One bringing his or her ‘seeming’ is concerned primarily with the impression his or her words or appearance make on the other, is not available for listening to the other as he or she is. We all move from more ‘being’ to more ‘seeming,’ according to our inner ability to break out from our imagined selfpresentation, and contract ourselves to make place for the other. By contracting himself or herself and making room for the patient, the therapist opens the way to enter the Between in therapy. The second element of Inclusion is “An event experienced by them in common” (Buber 1961: 124). Referring to psychotherapy, it is the responsibility of the therapist to relate to the therapeutic situation as to a significant reality for both the patient and himself or herself, by making himself or herself present in Buber’s terms. Making myself present entails risking and sacrificing my I as ego, my seeming, my self-image, my persona, my theories and programs, and open myself to the spontaneous, the unpredicted. The Between is a real experience of relationship between two participants, rather than of transference or projections. The ‘Between’ is another space, or yet another entity among the therapist’s and the patient’s various entities (Kron 1990, 1991). If the therapist is prepared to accept that what occurs in the therapy room is an event of new significance both for the patient and for
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himself or herself and that it is a meaningful reality – he or she then enables the event to be experienced by both as a common event. The third element of Inclusion is ‘imagining the real,’ defined by Buber as: “a bold swinging – demanding the most intensive stirring of one’s being – into the life of the other” (Buber 1961: 81). And “the fact that this one person, without forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at the same time lives through the common event from the standpoint of the other” (Buber 1961: 124). In his dialogue with Carl Rogers, Buber said: “When you do, so to speak, something to the patient, you feel yourself touched first by what you do to him. He cannot do it at all. You are at your side and at his side at the same time . . . He cannot be but where he is” (Buber 1965: 171). The therapist can imagine the reality of the patient whenever he or she opens himself to the patient, is prepared to ‘enter his otherness,’ while keeping his or her separateness at the same time. This is not identification, for throughout, the therapist retains his or her own viewpoint at the same time as being able to experience that of the patient. Nor is it empathy, for empathy is not always associated with a concrete reality of participation in a common situation. Imagining the real expands the concrete reality and has an ontic meaning. It is a sort of receptivity of the therapist towards the patient as to someone unique, in his or her entirety. The therapist permits himself or herself to be, as it were, imprinted by the unique stamp of a certain other facing him or her, and does so without losing his or her own separate identity. This is the special structure of Inclusion – a person remains themself at the same time as experiencing the other. The therapist contracts himself or herself as part of imagining the reality of the patient, and makes room for his or her unique otherness. But this is not a one-directional process. As the parent actualizes his or her parenthood by making room for the child and letting the child grow, so the therapist actualizes his or her therapeutic being by contracting his or her ego and making a place for the patient. Paradoxically, by this contraction the therapist becomes confirmed, while at the same time he or she confirms the patient as a unique other. Confirmation is based on the recognition of otherness, even when there is not full acceptance, and even when there is debate or contention. The tension between these poles – the one that is within each person, and the one between the two persons encountering one another – always remains (Buber 1965). The patient confirms the therapist as a person and a therapist, just as the therapist confirms the patient. Who knows better than we therapists how much we need this confirmation from our patients! Yet this human need does not in any way diminish our value as therapists. On the contrary, the more aware we are that we truly and deeply need our patients to confirm us as human beings, as a ‘You,’ the less is the danger of us exploiting them for our own needs as objects, as ‘Its.’
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Here is an example of a therapeutic process which holds for me the meaning of meeting in the Between, and of Inclusion: Rachel, a young woman, divorced and mother of a young son, sought therapy with the aim of examining the complex relations with her mother and her difficulty in breaking away from her parents and leading an independent life. Her relations with her parents were conflicted. Her parents were Holocaust survivors and their daughter had for them the role of the ‘guilty’ one, never satisfying her dominant and domineering mother’s wishes. Rachel reacted with a pseudorebelliousness without being able to really separate from her dependency on her mother. Since her divorce, her passivity and dependence had strengthened. She had not worked for a long time, had shut herself up at home, and made hardly any contact with people. After about 12 therapy sessions, we both got stuck in an endless circle of desperation and hopelessness. Her insight that since adolescence she had repeatedly gone through a pattern of attempts to cope independently with life, alternating with regression into passivity and dependence, had not moved Rachel to face the polarities in herself. I would try to ‘move’ her, get disappointed, stop for a while, then try again. She would reflect on her inability to move, ask for my help in trying to understand what blocked her, get somewhat aroused, then fall again into despair. In her desperation – and probably in mine too – she began to ask me to be more ‘authoritative’ and to demand she be more active in a concrete way. She spoke of an inner sense of emptiness and was fearful lest her inside be hollow and that there was nothing there. I fell into interpreting to her again and again the transference and the projective identifications, how she asked me to be her domineering mother, and how I felt inside me her despair. Finally, when one day she again expressed her wishes for a different, more demanding style, I told her, out of my deep conviction, that she should turn to a different therapist, since it did not seem to me that in the therapeutic relationship created between us, the change she apparently needed could occur. Rachel broke out in deep weeping for the first time since therapy had started. I sat quietly, feeling her sadness, but at the same time submitting to renunciation. At the end of the session I said to Rachel: “Apparently there are forces that are stronger than both of us.” At the following meeting, Rachel told me she had not stopped crying for a whole week, something which never happened to her before, and now she felt less despairing. She said she had been taken aback at my words, had felt the pain of separation, and after going through the whole experience, had reached an inner conviction there was nothing for her to look for in therapy with another therapist, and she had to come to terms with herself in the present therapy. I also gave much thought to Rachel in the days which elapsed, and I shared my thoughts with her. I told her after much thinking about her I came to the conclusion there is no choice but to accept the inner feeling of emptiness, of despondency, and that is the way things are. On hearing my words, Rachel again broke out in bitter weeping, but said that
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something in what had been said made her feel better. Some weeks later, she told me my attitude in “being together” with her in facing the abyss was for her a source of encouragement and strength even though I did not express any hope. As the therapy progressed, Rachel was able to take more responsibility for her life, found a job, and started dating potential partners. The turning point in the therapy contained the three elements of Inclusion. In the first part of the therapy, I was cast in the role of the ‘good mother’ who would compensate Rachel for her cruel mother, would comfort her during the process of divorce, write reports, advise and guide, and so on. When Rachel returned to therapy after two years, entering it with a more sincere attitude, the scenario was different. I no longer fulfilled these roles, and Rachel sank more and more into despondency until the moment when I entered it together with her. My consent that Rachel should go to a different therapist was both a surprise and a common event for both of us. Together we entered the existential situation, foregoing everything – and at that moment, paradoxically, we were in the Interhuman realm, in the Between. I imagined her reality, and faced with Rachel the abyss – hers and mine, while at the same time retaining my own point of view of the situation. After that, Rachel could evoke the remains of her responsibility for her fate and life. We both underwent a change at the same time and in the same experience, and a new common situation, what Buber terms ‘common world,’ was created between us. A story told by Rabbi Nachman of Brazlav, one of the founders of Hasidism, expresses the main ideas of Inclusion and the Between:
The turkey prince (my version, based on popular Hebrew versions) A royal prince once went mad and thought he was a turkey. He felt compelled to sit naked under the table, pecking at bones and pieces of bread like a turkey. All the royal physicians gave up hope of ever curing him of this madness and the king suffered tremendous grief. Then a Zaddik (a Jewish sage: the word Zaddik means righteous, proven, completed, enlightened) came and said: “I will undertake to try and cure him.” The Zaddik undressed and sat naked under the table next to the prince, picking at crumbs and bones. After a time – maybe days, maybe weeks – the prince asked: “Who are you? What are you doing here?” “And you,” replied the Zaddik, “What are you doing here?” “I am a turkey,” said the prince. “I am also a turkey,” answered the Zaddik. They sat together like this for some time without speaking a word, until they became good friends. One day, the Zaddik said to the prince: “What
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makes us think that a turkey can’t wear a shirt? We can wear shirts and still be turkeys.” The prince agreed and the Zaddik signaled the king’s servants to throw them some shirts. After a while, the Zaddik said: “What makes us think that we can’t be turkeys if we wear pants? We can wear pants and still be turkeys.” The prince agreed and the Zaddik signaled to the servants and they threw them some pants. They continued to sit together under the table, and finally the Zaddik said: “What makes us think turkeys must sit under the table? Even turkeys can sit at the table.” The prince agreed to sit at the table, and the Zaddik continued in this manner until the prince was completely healed. The story of the healing of the turkey prince is about a meeting between the healer (therapist) and the boy who, out of despair, left the human world. The therapist is ready to give up his persona, to do what Buber calls the ‘sacrifice’ – meaning to give up expectations and theories and be open and without mediation. The therapist is willing to take what Buber calls the ‘risk’ – total involvement, readiness to enter the encounter without self-defence, entering the patient’s inner world, and sharing the patient’s reality. The therapist relates to the patient as to an ‘independent other,’ confirming him as he is in the here and now – but also as he is meant to become. Buber writes: “. . . I not only accept the other as he is, but I confirm him, in myself, and then in him, in relation to this potentiality that is meant by him and it can now be developed, it can evolve, it can answer the realities of life” (Buber 1965: 182). Only after the Zaddik in our story had confirmed the prince in his polarity, could he gently give direction to the chaos in his soul. Only in the real meeting with the Zaddik, did it become worth it for the prince to come back to the world of human reality. Psychotherapy can be a very lonely affair, the more so when its goal is selfunderstanding or self-actualization. As long as therapy is centered on the self alone, it is in danger of inflation, for both the patient and the therapist. Opening the way for I–Thou dialogue, for the Between, needs contraction, so as to make room for the relationship. This, for me, is the meaning of ‘Self/ No-Self ’ in psychotherapy.
References Buber, M. (1947) Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters, trans. O. Marx, New York: Schocken. —— (1957) Pointing the Way, trans. and ed. M. Friedman, New York: Schocken Books. —— (1958a) I and Thou, trans. R. G. Smith, New York: Scribner & Sons. —— (1958b) Hasidism and Modern Man, trans. and ed. M. Friedman, New York: Horizon Press.
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—— (1961) Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith, New York: Macmillan. —— (1965) The Knowledge of Man; A Philosophy of the Interhuman, trans. and ed., with an introductory essay, M. Friedman, New York: Harper & Row. Kron, T. (1990) ‘The “We” in Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy and its implication for group therapy and the therapeutic community,’ International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, 11(1), 13–20. —— (1991) ‘The dialogical dimension in therapists’ dreams about their patients,’ Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Subjects, 28(2), 1–12.
Chapter 18
Muso¯ Soseki (1275–1351) The development of Zen culture out of conflicts Shoji Muramoto
Muso¯ Soseki (1275–1351) is one of the most important figures in the tradition of Japanese Rinzai Zen, as well as an important figure in the history of Japanese culture. The title granted to him by emperors, Kokushi, translates to National Teacher. He founded, or was asked to become the head priest of, many temples in Kamakura, Kyoto, and other regions. Though having never studied Buddhism in China like his predecessors, Eisai (1141–1215) and Do¯ gen (1200–1253), he had up-to-date knowledge of trends in Chinese Buddhism and shared spiritual concerns with Chinese colleagues. He was a multitalented artist creating poems and writings, and providing the model for gardens in Zen temples. His main writing on Zen and Buddhism in the form of questions and answers is now available in English (Muso¯ Kokushi 1996).
Buddhism and psychology in Muso¯ Soseki Interesting for psychologists are Muso¯ ’s life and works. His life offers an example of spiritual and psychological survival in a world full of conflicts. His thoughts were filled with psychological insight, as evinced in his words: “As long as people have not realized the basis of mind, their virtue is contaminated even if they do good works” (Muso¯ Kokushi 1976, 1996: 7). The Mind was for him the ultimate framework, and ethics had to rely on psychology. We must remember Buddhism itself was originally a system of psychology, if not in the Western sense of the word. American Buddhism, with an interest in psychology, may be seen as one of attempts to regain the original identity of Buddhism in the modern age, a point hardly grasped by modern Japanese Buddhists. Muso¯ Soseki’s Buddhist thoughts are basically psychological, and they do not show any marked deviation from the basic tenets of Mahayana Buddhism. For example, he firmly believed everyone is born with the Buddha nature, a mind already enlightened. Various Buddhist disciplines such as Koan practice and chanting sutras are only devices designed to make the learner aware of this fundamental truth.
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In today’s world, religions in general tend to be exclusively identified with formal trappings such as dogmas, rites, and churches. People whose spiritual needs are not met by these structures want to rely on their own inner experiences. Muso¯ Soseki’s stance in which formalities are only a means to Enlightenment is therefore appealing to them. Unlike modern people believing in free will, however, Muso¯ Soseki also emphasized that our existence is influenced by karma, including those of previous lives. Therefore, it is difficult for us to turn them in other directions. These ideas, too, are shared by other important Buddhist figures and deserve to be compared with psychological determinism in depth psychology today. He quotes many sutras such as the Lotus Sutras, Hua-yen Sutra, Yuan-chueh-ching, as well as many Zen sayings. He was well aware of the traditions of Zen Buddhism, and not so concerned with his originality as commitment to and position in the tradition.
Features of Muso¯ Soseki’s Buddhism The uniqueness of Muso¯ Soseki’s Buddhism may be found first in the tendency to synthesize apparent opposites, spiritual or secular: the Buddhas and sentient beings; enlightenment and samsara; being in the world and being outside the world; scriptures and Zen; Zen and other schools like Shingon and Pure Land; the Heike and the Genji as the two clans of samurai (warriors); the forces of emperors and samurai; the southern and northern dynasties; the Ashikaga brothers (Takauji and Tadayoshi); Mongolians and Japanese . . . and so on. His synthetic stance could be compared with Jung’s concept of the Transcendent Function or the symbolic attitude. This lets a reconciling symbol emerge from the depth of the mind through resistance against any temptation to choose one of the opposites. Second, the uniqueness of Muso¯ ’s Buddhism is found in his strong inclination to express understanding in artistic works. It originates from a basic feature of Rinzai Zen which seeks demonstrations of Enlightenment in concrete forms, unlike Soto Zen which is content with Shikan-taza, meaning concentration on sitting. I will suggest the biographical and historical background of Muso¯ ’s thoughts by giving a brief sketch of his life and suggest implications for the synthesis or interface of Buddhism and psychology in our age, seven centuries later. Texts used for reference are his biography (Zen Bunka Kenkyujo 1989) and Seizan Yawa (Night Talks in West Mountains; collated in Yanagida 1987a). Both are ascribed to his nephew, Shun’oku Myoha (1311–1388), the founder of Sho¯ koku-ji in Kyoto and the teacher and advisor of the third Shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408).
Childhood and youth Muso¯ ’s era, commonly called the Medieval Age of Japan, was a time in which the country was still experiencing fundamental transformations as a
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nation. In terms of political hegemony the Imperial family and aristocrats had been successively replaced by two clans of warriors, the Heike and the Genji, in the late eleventh century. Winning a series of battles with the Heike, the leader of the Genji, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–1199), succeeded in establishing the first warriors’ government in 1192, initiating the period of Kamakura. But, after three generations of the Genji, the leadership of the government shifted to the Ho¯ jo¯ Clan, originally of the Heike. Further, tension still remained between the Imperial family and forces of warriors. Even worse, Japan was twice, in 1274 and 1281, almost invaded by Mongols, and ensuing struggles for the defense of the country exhausted and weakened the government. In 1275, one year after the first Mongolian attack, Muso¯ Soseki was born in a warrior family in Ise, presently Mie prefecture. His father was of the Genji, and his mother of the Heike. So his parents were of the opposing clans of warriors, a possible stressor in his early family life. When the boy was four-years-old, for some unknown reason, his family had to move from Ise to Kai, an inland region with many mountains which was the homeland of the Genji. In the same year as the move to Kai, his mother died. Convinced the boy had been granted to her as a gift from the Avalokitesvara (Jap. Kannon – Kuan Yin), she asked him, before her death, to become a priest. Her death must have played a major role in helping him realize a pivotal truth of Buddhist thought, namely, the impermanence of all things. It is believed he received a message from her that the Buddhist priesthood was the only secure way out of the secular conflicts which had distressed her to death. In fact, he later built Kannon Halls in the many temples in which he resided. He was to become a pacifist. Fortunately, he was raised and loved by his stepmother, an object of affection throughout his life. There is no doubt that the matrix of Muso¯ ’s Buddhism arose from these early experiences. It was nourished by the natural beauty of Kai, where he spent most of his childhood and youth, to which he returned even after his Enlightenment. He preferred staying in rural areas to responding to invitations from political authorities in Kyoto or Kamakura. The Zen gardens he later arranged may be attempts to restore and represent the familiar landscapes of childhood. As a bright and talented nine-year-old, Muso¯ was taken by his father to a temple of the Shingon sect to begin the discipline of becoming a priest. After his mother’s death, the 10-year-old boy, to people’s surprise, spontaneously recited the whole Lotus Sutra for seven days to insure the repose of her soul. At 14, the future Kokushi was involved in nava-asubha-bhavanah (Jap. Kuso-zu), a meditation in which one intensively watches the nine pictures which Queen Danrin (786–850) ordered to be drawn just before her death. They depict a sequence of the decaying process of her corpse in the course of time. The meditation is designed to make one realize the impermanence of all things, including a beautiful lady of high rank, and so
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renounce delusions leading to samsara. After this meditation, all people looked like skeletons to him. Through this meditation the adolescent possibly tried to overcome his budding sexual desire, or at least his strong aesthetic inclinations. So it is very interesting that he was later absorbed in creating very beautiful Zen gardens full of symbols. Despite, or rather because of, the Buddhist discipline, his quest for beauty could not be given up but, on the contrary, contributed to the formation of a new Japanese culture. At 17 (1292), Muso¯ Soseki went to Todai-ji in Nara, one of the national temples at the time, to be formally ordained by receiving the precepts there. Given the Buddhist name of Chikaku, he came back to Kii as a Shingon priest.
The meaning of ‘Muso¯ Soseki’ Next year, the 18-year-old priest experienced one of the most decisive events influencing his career and philosophy. He saw an erudite teacher with whom he had studied Tendai Buddhism at the temple become sick and die in a confused state of mind. Chikaku was so shocked and disappointed to see how little intellectual knowledge helped one face the fundamental human reality of death, that he decided to seclude himself in a room for a hundred days to reflect upon his discipline thus far and to explore its future direction. Three days before the end of this incubation, he had a very significant dream: An unknown man appeared and took him to a Zen temple called Sozan, and then to another one called Sekito¯ . An old master invited him inside the temple and gave him a picture scroll of the Bodhidharma. When the dreamer put it into his clothes, he woke up. He immediately realized Zen to be the orientation of his Buddhism. But, interestingly, the need for the synthesis of studies of scriptures and practice, scholarship and meditation, and Shingon and Zen remained one of the basic themes throughout his life. This dream needs some historical notes to be appreciated fully. Zen didn’t just mysteriously occur to Chikaku only in his dream, but, as his biography suggests, he had already heard about Zen, especially one of its tenets: kyo¯ ge-betsuden – transmission of the Buddhist truth without dependence upon scriptures. By this time, Do¯ gen, who had returned to Japan in 1227, had already founded the tradition of Japanese Soto Zen at Eihei-ji far from Kamakura. Moreover, great Chinese Zen priests in the Sung-dynasty, such as Lan-his Tao-lung (1213–1278) and his student Wu-hsueh Tsu-yuan (1226–1286), had fled from the threat of invading Mongols to Japan where they were received by the Kamakura government as spiritual teachers for its leaders. Some of them also became head priests of important Zen temples in Kamakura (such as Kencho¯ -ji and Engaku-ji). Because Kai was near to Kamakura, it is very likely Chikaku had read some Zen texts and got some information about the situation of Buddhism there. ‘Sozan’ in his dream is originally a Zen priest called Shu-shan Guang-ren (Jap. Sozan Ko¯ jin) (837–909). He is known to have had a priest build a juto ¯
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(a stuba or tomb) for him. So this juto¯ was nothing but Sozan himself, based upon the central tenet of Shingon Buddhism which contends one can become a Buddha without physical death. Sekito¯ (Ch. Shih-t’ou His-ch’ien, 700–790) belonged to the line beginning with Hui-neng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch and the founder of the Southern Sect which advocated the sudden insight. According to Ching-te-ch’uan-teng-Lu (Jap. Keitoku-dento¯ roku), Sekito¯ said: “This very mind, just this is Buddha Mind, and sentient beings, perfect wisdom and the defiling passions – these are but different names for one and the same substance.” This thought, relevant to our interest in the relationship of Buddhism and psychology, repeatedly appears in the future Kokushi’s writings. Sekito¯ is also well known for the mondo¯ or a series of questions and answers which exemplify the Zen spirit of jikisi-ninshin-kensho¯ -jo¯ butsu, directly pointing to one’s mind, seeing into one’s own nature and becoming the Buddha: “What about emancipation?” asked a monk. “Who binds you?” said the master. “What about the Pure Land?” – “Who defiles you?” was the reply. “What about nirvana?” – “Who puts you in samsara?” was Shih-t’ou’s reply (Dumolin 1994: 166). It may be strange that in 1297 Chikaku did not go to Kamakura, the current center of Zen Buddhism in Japan, but to Kii to study Zen with Shinchi Kakushin (1207–1298), a Zen priest who had transmitted Mumonkan (Ch. Wu-men-kuan) from China to Japan. Yanagida suggests the reason for this was Chikaku’s need to maintain his earlier commitment to esoteric Buddhism since his childhood and his critical stance toward the Kamakura’s one-sided preference to new-styled Sung-dynasty Zen, a fashion at the time (Yanagida 1987b: 112). On his way to Kii he visited a peer priest in Kyoto. This colleague advised him to change his plan and to study with Muin Empan (1230–1307), one of Lan-his Tao-lung’s disciples, at Kennin-ji in Kyoto. This temple was founded by Eisai and now had an established discipline system. It is at this period that, remembering his significant dream, Chikaku began to call himself ‘Muso¯ Soseki’. ‘So¯ ’ and ‘seki’ were respectively the first Chinese letters of the names of the two Zen monks mentioned in the dream: ‘Sozan’ and ‘Sekito¯ .’ ‘Mu’ means dreams. Thinking of the dream as a metaphor for the impermanence of all things was not new in Buddhism. It was an idea cherished by many Buddhists. Chikaku joined a Buddhist tradition of regarding a dream as something lacking substance, deceptive, and so not to be relied upon, however fascinating they may appear. But, like some of his predecessors – Shinran (1173–1262), the founder of Pure Land Shin Sect, and Myo¯ e (1173–1232), the restorer of Kegon school – Muso¯ Soseki took his dreams seriously, and let them decide his orientation in the world. For these Buddhists, therefore, dreams could be revelations as well: another point where Buddhism and depth psychology meet. ‘So’ meaning ‘window’ is not a mere window but a metaphor for a perspective from which one sees the world and all things that happen there in the
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mode of dreams. Seizan Yanagida suggests it derives from the expression ‘the window of Emptiness’ appearing in the ninth picture entitled ‘The Return to the Origin’ of The Ten Ox-herding Pictures. It depicts how, irrespective of disturbances in a person’s eyes, ears, and mouth, Nature shows itself by making flowers bloom and leaves fall (Yanagida 1994: 22). His new name, Muso¯ Soseki, therefore, clearly represented his new identity as a Zen priest well informed and conscious of the tradition of Zen Buddhism as well as the Shingon background.
The quest for Enlightenment After studying in Kamakura and Kyoto, and then in 1299, hearing the news of the arrival of I-shang I-ning (Jap. Issan Ichinei, 1247–1317) as an official messenger from the Yuan dynasty of China, Muso¯ Soseki went again to Kamakura to study Zen with I-shang I-ning at Kencho¯ -ji for about three years. However, not completely satisfied with this Chinese master, Muso¯ left Kamakura and traveled northward the next year to find a better teacher. He looked forward to meeting Ko¯ ho¯ Kenjitsu (1241–1316) at Ungan-ji in Nasu (now called Tochigi). Ko¯ ho¯ Kenjitsu had succeeded the Dharma of Wu-hsueh Tsu-yuan. Knowing the master had gone to Kamakura, he remained at the temple that winter and then started a journey back to Kamakura to serve I-shang I-ning again at Engaku-ji in 1302. There he repeatedly begged the master to directly point to the Self. In response, the master merely said he had nothing to give him nor upaya nor compassion. After visiting Ko¯ ho¯ Kenjitsu at Manju-ji in Kamakura, Muso¯ in 1303 set out on a journey northward again, with the vow that he would completely devote himself to the discipline. He further vowed he would decay like the grasses and trees if he could not reach Enlightenment. Before leaving Kamakura, the master warned him never to cling to any discrimination between profane-being and sacred-being. This is perhaps a variation of the basic tenet of esoteric Buddhism: the non-duality of vajradhatu-mandala, the mandala of the diamond world, and garbha-dhatu-mandala, the mandala of the womb world (Yanagida 1987b: 141). This directly pointed to the basic conflict in Muso¯ Soseki’s life and was to remain the central theme in his works. On his way back to Kamakura, at Usuba in Hitachi, Soseki was asked to stay for some time at the house of a patron. It was during his stay there that Soseki attained Enlightenment, occasioned by a small accident. One day he found himself having been sitting under a tree in the garden until midnight. Trying to go up into the hut, he hit himself against the wall where he thought there was no wall and fell to the ground. Startling back and getting the giggles, he uttered a poem: “I have long sought a blue sky by digging the earth, and taken pains to accumulate barriers. One night I kicked a block and broke bones of Nothingness into pieces.” In Yanagida’s view this was the first
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detailed account of Enlightenment experience in the history of Japanese Zen Buddhism, and the starting point for his later activities in various fields led to the development of the Zen culture represented by Gozan Bungaku (Yanagida 1987b: 120). Soseki returned in 1305 to Kamakura to meet Ko¯ ho¯ Kenjitsu. While staying there he showed his insight to the master, and thus became the successor of the master’s Dharma by receiving the inka, or Dharma seal, from him.
Burying oneself alive in the world Instead of starting his brilliant career in Kamakura or Kyoto, Soseki immediately returned to Kai, the homeland of the Genji. There he opened Jo¯ kyo-ji, a small temple which provided discipline and instruction in both Zen and esoteric Buddhism. Thereafter he spent about 20 years on retreat in the mountains. An enlightened monk’s avoidance of secular promotion or glory is not unique to Soseki but belongs to the Zen tradition called Sho¯ tai-cho¯ yo¯ , literally meaning long nourishment of the sacred embryo. ‘The sacred embryo’ here refers to the mind that has just been enlightened. That mind needs a considerable amount of time to mature and develop into the mind of a spiritual master who is able to work favorably for the liberation of people from the samsara. Characteristically, Soseki later repeatedly warned of the danger of the greed for high reputation and self-interest in MuchuMondo¯ -shu. This Zen tradition began with Ma-tsu Tao-I (Jap. Baso Do¯ itsu, 709–788). It was he who identified the Mind with the Buddha, and said that a person with such a mind has to do nothing special. Another contemporary monk in Japan who practiced Sho¯ tai-cho¯ yo¯ was Shuho Myocho (1282–1337). After Enlightenment, he hid himself by living among beggars along the bank of the Kamo River in Kyoto. After living there for 25 years, he was sought out by the government and invited to become the head priest of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. Despite seclusion in the mountains for many years, Muso¯ Soseki’s reputation grew among monks as well as with political leaders interested in Zen Buddhism. Each time they attempted to invite him to Kamakura or Kyoto, Muso¯ Soseki changed his residence, one after another, always in the deep mountains. The temple he founded there, and the one at which he made his first garden, was Eiho¯ -ji in Mino. In 1314 he built a Kannon Hall within the temple. In 1318, Kakukai, the mother of Shikken Ho¯ jo¯ Takatoki (1303–1333) and the leader of the government, invited him to Kamakura. Instead of accepting, he fled to Tosa. He responded positively to her second invitation offered the next year, but lived in a small hut for about eight years, first near Kamakura and then Kazusa. He saw no one during this period. He also refused the first invitation by Emperor Godaigo (1288–1339) to become the head priest of Nanzen-ji in Kyoto. He accepted this invitation only upon
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the Emperor’s second request in 1325. The next year, after serving there only for one year, he moved to Kamakura to live in a small hut and founded Zuisen-ji there in 1327. After beginning to serve as the head priest of Engaku-ji in Kamakura in 1329, the next year he retreated from it and founded Erin-ji in Kai. He arranged gardens in both Zuisen-ji and Erin-ji. However, he was not allowed to enjoy this seclusion forever. He was increasingly forced to get involved in political struggles between the imperial force represented by Emperor Godaigo in Kyoto and the forces of Samurai in Kamakura. In 1333 the Kamakura government fell, and the Imperial force regained the ruling power of Japan. Emperor Godaigo decreed that Muso¯ Soseki come to Kyoto and to reside at Rinsen-ji, and then become the head priest of Nanzen-ji the next year. But in 1336, Ashikaga Takauji (1305–1358), who had earlier served the Emperor, revolted and established another line of Emperors, forcing Emperor Godaigo to flee from Kyoto to Yoshino. So Japan was in a state of division into the northern and southern dynasties for more than half a century (1336–1392). Muso¯ Soseki’s position and stance during this period of political crisis was very interesting. Moving from Nanzen-ji to Rinsen-ji, he was not identified as simply belonging to the Imperial force by the new ruler, Ashikaga Takauji. This was so because Ashikaga Takauji also admired him as his spiritual teacher. Muso¯ Soseki, therefore, had to find a way unbiased to either of his students, since both were political figures of utmost importance. In this context, Muso¯ Soseki realized he needed a stance similar to the earlier one taken by his mother. He had to to stand in the middle of the road. His situation was a little different from hers, as he was widely recognized as a spiritually authoritative figure. It is obvious Muso¯ Soseki exerted spiritualpolitical influences upon the new government ruled by the Ashikaga clan. Be it good or bad, that was how the connection of Japanese Rinzai Zen with political powers was deepened. In 1339, two important things happened to Muso¯ Soseki. One is that he was asked to rearrange Saiho¯ -ji in Nishi-yama (the Western Mountain district of Kyoto), a desolate temple of the Pure Land Sect originally founded by Gyo¯ ki (668–749). The district earlier had been the place where ordinary people’s corpses were discarded. And, if Yanagida’s (1987a) assumption is correct, Muso¯ Soseki rearranged Saiho¯ -ji as his own tomb, though he lived a life full of activities for more than 10 years thereafter. I fully agree with Yanagida’s interpretation that Muso¯ Soseki’s primary concern was the art of burying himself alive in the world (Yanagida 1987a: 27). In rearranging Saiho¯ -ji, more popularly known as the Moss-temple, Muso¯ Soseki drew upon two koans from Chinese Zen classical texts of Sung-dynasty: Hekiganroku and Daiebuko, which respectively depicted two figures five centuries before him. One was Nan-yang Hui-chung (675–775). The other was Liang Zuo-zhu. Nan-yang Hui-chung, one of Hui-neng’s (638–713) disciples, to avoid secular honor after Enlightenment, retreated
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into the solitude of the mountains for 40 years. Nonetheless, he could not help but accept the third invitation from Emperor Su-tsung in 761, and spent the rest of his life in the capital, giving occasional lectures at the court. Tai-tsung, the next Emperor, bestowed upon him the title of ‘National Teacher.’ When once asked by the Emperor what he wanted, the old master gave a reply of ‘a seamless pagoda.’ The Emperor, having no idea of its meaning, was advised by Nan-yang Hui-chung to visit his disciple Tan-yüan. After his master’s death, the disciple explained to a messenger from the court its meaning in a more mysterious poem: South of Hsian and north of Tang In between. Gold abounds, The ferryboat under the shadowless tree, No holy one in the emerald palace. According to Heinrich Dumolin, the first line suggests the cosmic levels of the seamless pagoda, namely it is everywhere and nowhere, the ferry boat refers to the Great Vehicle (Mahayana) (Dumolin 1994: 160). More to the point, however, this poem depicts the Pure Land. Muso¯ Soseki used the phrases in the poem to designate huts and objects in the lower part of the garden of Saiho¯ -ji. He obviously identified himself with Nan-yang Hui-chung, and suggests his longing for Pure Land, or the liberation from this world of samsara full of conflicts. By arranging the garden, he provided a perspective beyond the discrimination of life and death, and suggested his life thereafter would be a living beyond the earthly life. In fact, just before beginning to live at Saiho¯ -ji, Muso¯ Soseki wrote a kind of living will to his disciples consisting of harsh warnings – almost a renunciation of inheriting his Dharma lineage to any disciple. He says that one who claims to have received a Dharma seal from him is a liar. Liang Zuo-zhu (hereafter, Z), another important figure for him, was a renowned scholar of sutras and commentaries. When he once visited Ma-tsu (709–788, hereafter, M), the following discussion took place between them: M: Z: M: Z: M: Z: M:
What sutra do you teach? The Heart Sutra. What do you use to teach it? The heart, not the mouth. How can you teach it with the heart? How can Emptiness teach it except the heart? Remember that Emptiness does teach it.
Embarrassed by, and so ignoring, Ma-tsu, Liang Zuo-zhu was about to leave the platform, when Ma-tsu called him from behind, “Hey, Professor!” and asked the scholar, “Who has just turned around?” Just then Liang Zuo-zhu
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suddenly became enlightened. Coming home, he closed his school and hid himself in Xi-Shan (Jap. Seizan, West Mountain) (Yanagida 1987: 28–29). Muso¯ Soseki obviously identified himself with Liang Zuo-zhu because he too suffered from the synthesis of academic studies and spiritual practice. He shared with Liang Zuo-zhu the pain of renouncing the study of scriptures for spiritual practice. Five centuries later, a bright man, Xiong Xiu-cai, who had just passed the examination and would become an elite bureaucrat, was traveling in a mountain of the region of Xi-Shan, and saw a priest meditating on a rock. The man looked like Liang Zuo-zhu. Thus, he wondered how a man from many centuries ago could be there. When he asked the priest, “Are you Liang Zuo-zhu?” the priest silently raised his hand and pointed his finger to the east. It had stopped raining, and the young man looked to the pointed direction. When he turned round, however, he found no one on the rock, but its surface was nonetheless wet from the rain except the part where the priest seemed to have been sitting. The garden of Saiho¯ -ji has two parts. The lower part was older and in the style of chisen-kaiyu, where one was led to walk around the pond in the form of the Chinese letter meaning Mind. The upper part was Muso¯ Soseki’s creation. It was in the new style called kari-sansui or kare-sansui, a garden in which mountains and waters – while not physically existing – are only visible with one’s inner eyes. This is an artistic expression of Muso¯ Soseki’s philosophy beyond the distinction between being and non-being, dreams and reality, which may be akin to psychologies of Jung or Winnicott. This style was adopted in Zen temples thereafter like Kinkaku-ji, Ginkaku-ji, and Ryoan-ji. Another important event occurred for Muso¯ Soseki in 1339. One night in 1339 he had an impressive dream, shortly before Emperor Godaigo’s actual death in Yoshino, far away from Kyoto. In this dream, the Emperor of the southern dynasty, in the form of a priest, entered his villa in Kameyama. Only two months later, after his death, Emperor Komei of the northern dynasty controlled by Ashikaga Takauji, issued a decree to make Muso¯ Soseki reconstruct it into a Zen temple and be its founder for the repose of the dead emperor’s soul. Interestingly, the strongest political leader in Japan at the time was moved by the high priest’s dream to spiritually reconcile with his enemy. The name of the temple ‘Tenryu¯-ji’ is based upon a dream by Ashikaga Tadayoshi (1306–1352), Takauji’s brother and his collaborator, in which a golden dragon (Jap. ryu ¯ ) emerged out of the river and flew up to heaven (Jap. ten). Being a disciple of Muso¯ Soseki, he was to appear as the questioner in Muchu Mondo¯ and was then killed by his brother. Tenryu¯-ji was, of course, also expected to politically display the strength of the Ashikaga clan and its new government to the world. In this way Tenryu¯-ji had begun to be built. The fund for the building was raised by commercial trade with China – using a ship called Tenryu¯-ji-sen. Thus, it is
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an irony that, unlike Soto Zen, Rinzai Zen became increasingly involved in politics and economics as well. Seen as a whole, Muso¯ Soseki’s life was full of conflicts and contradictions. As mentioned earlier, he interrupted the lineage of the Dharma light, but, according to a note conserved in Tenryu¯-ji and Sho¯ koku-ji, he had 13,000 pupils. Despite his harsh criticism of priests’ indulgence in literature and scriptural studies at the cost of Buddhist discipline, most Zen priests representing Gozan Bungaku were his disciples. It would be correct to say that the Muromachi Zen culture mostly owes its origin to Muso¯ Soseki, and now we tourists, Japanese or foreign, are attracted to and enjoy his heritage. We must remember Muso¯ ’s caution: “All that I have said so far is nothing but calling Xiao-xiu.” The reference to Xiao-xiu, the name of a maid serving a lady of a rich family, derives from an anecdote told by the fifth patriarch Fa-yen (1104). The lady, living deep inside of a house, repeatedly ordered Xiao-xiu to do many trivial things such as opening the door and closing the lattice. She called her name loudly, when she knew that her beloved man had come close to her house. The only intention of her orders was to make him realize that she was there. This story makes us wonder whether we have ever realized this lady’s existence inside the house, since we only see the maid doing ordered things, or, at most, we hear her voice. Thus, we must ask ourselves whether in Japanese Buddhism we ever know the True Mind behind the cultural forms that suggest it.
References Dumolin, H. (1994) Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume 1, India and China, trans. J. W. Heisig and P. Knitter, London: Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall International. Muso¯ Kokushi (1976) Muchu-Mondo ¯ -shu, trans. and annotated by K. Kawase, Tokyo: Kodansha [in Japanese]. —— (1996) Dream Conversation on Buddhism and Zen, trans. T. Clearly, Boston, MA and London: Shambhala. Yanagida, S. (1987a) Nihon no Zen-Goroku 7: Muso ¯ , Tokyo: Chikuma-shobo [in Japanese]. —— (1987b) Zen no Jidai, Tokyo: Chikuma-shobo [in Japanese]. —— (1994) Zen Nyumon 5: Muso¯ , Tokyo: Kodansha [in Japanese]. Zen Bunka Kenkyujo (1989) Muso ¯ -kokushi Goroku, Kyoto: Tenryu¯ji Sodo [in Japanese].
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Part VII
Myth and fairy tale
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Chapter 19
The image of Mahavairocanatatha-gata emerging from the therapist at a crucial point in therapy Konoyu Nakamura
Buddhism and I First, I would like to lightly touch on my religious background. Since birth, I have been a Buddhist of The True Pure Land Sect founded by Shinran. It is common for individual Japanese families to support a temple belonging to one of the institutional Buddhist sects. The system of family temples was started in the seventeenth century by the Governor, Iemitsu Tokugawa. The main purpose was political – to exclude Christianity from Japan and to exercise systematic control of the population. Also, as is well known, Japanese Buddhism is characterized by ancestor worship, not found in original Buddhism. Ancestor worship is the spiritual core of the family system which bonds family members and keeps them in order. While the dogma and practice of The True Pure Land Sect intends salvation for all individuals, no matter their class, race, or gender, its institutional system is marked by a patriarchal hierarchy (Takasaki 1988). My parents were liberal for their generation and not interested in religious activities, so I grew up without receiving any religious education within my family. I had never approached spiritual problems through Buddhism, and found institutional Buddhist doctrine authoritarian and patriarchal.
Jungian psychology and Buddhism I have worked as a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist for more than 20 years at clinical facilities around Kyoto, Japan. It is well known Jung was greatly interested in religious problems throughout his life. He was not only interested in Christianity but also other past and present religions, including Eastern faiths. He integrated these ideas in his theories and practices. For example, Jung famously respected the mandala as a symbol of the Self or totality. He seemed to be especially interested in meditation or Yoga. As Yasuo Yuasa (1983), a Japanese Jungian scholar, said, Jung was not a Buddhist scholar and did not know Japanese Buddhist history. However, it is generally considered that, of the many schools of psychology, Jungian psychology directly deals
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with spirituality and the soul of the human being. Therefore, Jungian psychotherapy asks therapists to confront their own religious and spiritual problems. I started training as a Jungian psychotherapist in my late thirties. Through my own experiences during my training analysis, I gradually developed an interest in spiritual and religious problems. I realized religious symbols or images appearing in my dreams actually provided me with meaningful insight, comfort, and salvation. It was also fortunate for me when I encountered my analyst, an American Jungian. She was also a feminist and Buddhist with a deep knowledge of Japanese Buddhism. While she accepted and understood my frustration, negative thoughts, and feelings towards institutional Buddhism in Japan, she introduced me to the essence of Buddhism. Learning about Buddhism in English through texts written by women led me to a more profound personal understanding of the religion; my earlier experience had been through the works of Japanese male authority figures. It was especially surprising for me that many psychotherapists from abroad, whom I met at the first conference for Buddhism and Depth Psychology in Kyoto in 1999, were interested in Buddhism. At that time I also experienced, for the first time, meditation with foreign colleagues. After the conference, I started to pay closer attention to Buddhism and to respect the values of Eastern religions and philosophies for psychotherapy.
Japanese esoteric Buddhism, Shingon Mahavairocana-tatha-gata is the Buddha who expounds esoteric Buddhism, which I will now outline. Esoteric Buddhism appeared in India during the seventh and eighth centuries and was much influenced by Hindu ritual. Later it was introduced to China and to other Asian countries but, by the thirteenth century, it had almost lost its power throughout most of Asia, except for Tibet and Japan (Yoritomi 1988: 44). In Tibet, for geographical reasons, esoteric Buddhism still preserved its early form, which had developed from the eighth to ninth centuries in India. The famous Tibetan esoteric Buddhism, Tantrism, accepted the sexual and the physical, and respected femininity in its dogma and practices (Yoritomi 1988: 41–42). I do not know enough to comment at length about contemporary Tibetan Buddhism, but I believe I am correct in stating that it attempts to integrate the sacred with daily life. Its world viewpoint, symbolized by the mandala (Sueki 1988: 198), has provided much inspiration to Western intellectuals, like Jung. Esoteric Buddhism was introduced to Japan by Kukai from China where it derived from middle-period esoteric Indian Buddhism. Late-period esoteric Buddhism, like Tibetan Buddhism, was also introduced in China but it is unlikely the sexual elements were accepted there, as China had at that time embraced Confucianism, which strongly repressed erotic elements (Yoritomi 1988: 62). Kukai was a brilliant figure who introduced the most systematized
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esoteric Buddhism to Japan. He mastered esoteric Buddhism during his surprisingly short stay in China and brought not only the complete scriptures for the foundation of esoteric Buddhism, Mahavairocana-sutra and Vajrasekharasutra, but also many tools for rituals. He arranged and developed basic theories of esoteric Buddhism to suit Japanese culture and needs and completed a different form of esoteric Buddhism, Shingon, which means ‘true word’ (Yamasaki 1988: 26–28). It is beyond the scope of this chapter for me to explain Kukai’s profound works concerning Shingon. However, I would like to discuss an important concept he introduced: becoming a Buddha immediately. Motohiro Yoritomi, a Japanese scholar, deals with Kukai’s idea (1988). According to him, Kukai intended to introduce esoteric Buddhism to Japan as a counter to Mahayana Buddhism, which, at that time, required people to train long and hard to reach enlightenment. Kukai taught that by adopting a new method for training the three functions (three secrets: body, speech, and mind), people could reach enlightenment quickly. Later, he added ideas to the theory: there is no border between the phenomenal (the commonplace) and the existence (the sacred) in harmony with the six elements – earth, water, fire, wind, space, and consciousness. He explained that these states are always represented by four kinds of mandala. People can approach these states through three functions – body, speech, and mind. These ideas are grounded in an idea of the Innate Buddhanature: all human beings have the possibility to reach enlightenment (Kukai 1988: 83–84). Yoritomi boldly interpreted the idea of becoming Buddha immediately, saying that all people have the possibility to mystically integrate the sacred and the commonplace when they touch the existence through their physical, verbal, and mental experiences. And, under some conditions, people could identify themselves with the whole universe with great delight being within The Pure Land of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata (Kukai 1988: 92). Outlining esoteric Buddhism, we find some similar points to Jungian psychology; for example, mysticism, tolerance of different religions, transcendent dualism, and respect for the totality and the numinous. These may be reasons why some Jungians are attracted to esoteric Buddhism. Radmila Moacanin, in The Essence of Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart (2003) pointed out many further similarities between them. In my case, I have accessed Buddhism via Jungian psychology; for example, Jung’s work about mandala and my personal analysis. After the conference in 1999, I visited Toji temple, which is the head temple of Shingon. There I was able to look at a variety of mandalas as fresh impressions, and engage with them with an intensity I could not have achieved in my previous visits. Whenever I experienced personal difficulties, I began to visit various temples of the Shingon sect near to my home. I found some comfort and peace in their sacred and mysterious atmosphere. However, honestly speaking, I am neither a pious Buddhist nor a scholar of
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Buddhism, and I have never been involved in any specific practice or training as a Buddhist.
My clinical experience My patient was a young man, 28 years old, when I met him first. He had grown up in the Kansai area. He was a bright boy at school and entered a national university to study economics. After graduation, he began work for a major Japanese corporation. He married a woman from his home town, and they moved to Tokyo as he was chosen for special training to be sent abroad. He was on a fast track to higher management within the company, and his future appeared assured. The company sponsored him to receive training in New York. However, soon after he moved there by himself, he broke down with psychosomatic symptoms due to serious homesickness. He was sent back to Tokyo and advised to see a company counselor and a psychiatrist. After a six-month holiday and work with the counselor, he returned to work in Kansai. The next year, he was involved in a great project, increasing his work load and responsibility. He started to feel stifled. At this time, he decided to voluntarily visit a therapist. I worked with him once a week for eight years. At first, he refused to see a psychiatrist, but later accepted he needed to do so. The psychiatric diagnosis was panic disorder and depression, with a compulsive personality. He had difficulties managing relationships with others due to aggression and a lack of empathy. At the same time, he was vulnerable to others’ opinions of him. He could not directly express emotions in front of me. It became obvious that the more our conscious relationship cooled, the more his dependence on me and his unconscious transferential relationship deepened and intensified, as shown by the following episode. At one point, I left Japan to travel to the United States for six months. When my patient and I talked about my impending absence, superficially he appeared calm, accepting it and agreeing to see another young colleague. However, he stopped seeing this new therapist shortly thereafter and broke down again. He needed a couple of months to be able to confide his real feelings about my absence.
The emerging image of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata I had to leave the company where I was working with the patient after I got my appointment at a university far from the Kansai area. At that time, his career had been completely wrecked due to breakdowns, and his married life was not going well, either. He often implied he would commit suicide, and was involved in some self-destructive behavior. He complained that the company held him in low esteem and that his wife refused him sexual relations. He could not find any meaning in his life and felt no one needed him. It was
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clearly a serious crisis, and a crucial point in our work together. I thought that I would have to carefully treat him to decrease his damage by my leaving, and that it was absolutely necessary for him to express his emotion in our sessions. This time, he seemed to succeed in some way to express his emotion about the separation from myself, but this expression was so distorted that he confined himself within self-abandoned talk. He had struggled for a month to find a way to release his feelings. Eventually, with only three sessions remaining, coming in the room, he said, “I have something that I must absolutely tell you today.” Then he continued, “I will miss you a lot. You know, I am damaged by change very much and I had never imagined you would leave. I have clung to an idea that no one needs me, and I am always biting my nails.” “Do you do anything else?” I asked. “I hit myself,” he responded. “How do you hit yourself ? Terribly?” I asked him again. Suddenly, he started to strongly hit his face many times. I was too shocked by his sudden acting out to say anything. Then, feeling so sad, I asked him, “Have you ever cried?” “Never.” Here, I completely understood his deep despair and absolute loneliness. I also clearly realized there was nothing I could do for him at that moment. I stopped trying to do anything and tried to withdraw myself because it seemed for me there was no way to escape. I ceased consciously responding to him and concentrated on the search within myself. I closed my eyes and did meditation with Hokkai-join, the hand sign of the dharma-dhatu meditation (Mitsumori and Okada 1995). Keeping silent, I simply waited for something to come to mind. I had never done such a thing in front of a patient and did not exactly know the meaning of Hokkai-join. I do not know why I did such an unusual deed but it seemed natural at the time. Soon, a fantastic vision emerged in my mind: That is, there is a real dark space, the universe, in which many galaxies with cool brilliance are slowly moving. Intuitively, I realized the image represented the universe and the Mahavairocana-tatha-gata himself who is the Absolute being reigning over the whole universe. I impressively felt his vast and boundless mercy, which contained me and forgave me, a powerless therapist. If this was so, I was sure that my suffering patient must be accepted, contained, and relieved in the great mercy and that he could overcome this crisis by himself. My heart swelled with conviction and hope and they brought me exultation with tears of joy. This took seconds. Opening my eyes, I found my patient gazing at me. I had never before observed such a serious look in his eyes. I did not tell him anything as it seemed to me we no longer needed any verbal communication. We spent
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about twenty minutes together in silence and we finished the session in peace. After this, his rage, distorted aggression, and serious self-destructive behavior disappeared. In our last session, he calmly expressed his thankfulness to his wife for her devoted support and his happiness working at the company and he greatly appreciated me for our long work together. After my departure, he was able to go on well without breaking down, with the help of his new therapist, a middle-aged woman with considerable clinical experience. Once, I argued on this clinical experience from two Jungian concepts, touching the Self and transferential relationship (Nakamura 2008). In that paper, I considered how the image led us – the therapist and the patient – to our transformation. Here, I will discuss that from a Buddhist concept: no-self (non-self ) or no-ego (non-ego).
‘No-self ’ initiating the transcendent As I said before, my patient’s aggression was so intense that he destroyed everything around him. If I had tried to counter his aggression at its peak, I might have been crushed by it. If the therapist is crushed, the patient must be crushed too. Or if the therapist exclusively defends herself/himself from the patient’s aggression, there is no psychotherapy, though the therapist can survive. I think that, here, no-self has a crucial meaning. According to the Japanese–English Buddhist Dictionary (1991), Non-self or Non-ego is the absence of a permanent, unchanging self or soul. The self that is supposed by heretics to be real, i.e., eternal one, and absolutely ruling, is unreal. Self means substance; therefore, non-selfness is no-substantiality. Regarding the Eastern non-ego, Jung said with slight surprise or envy: To us, consciousness is inconceivable without an ego; it is equated with relation of contents to an ego. If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything. The ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process. The eastern mind, however, has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego. Conscious is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition; indeed, in its “higher” forms, the ego disappears altogether. (1954: 484, para 774) However, it does not mean we Japanese do not have ego consciousness in our ordinary lives or that we are always in deep meditative states (Watanabe 1994). As Jung said, one needs “a special training of indefinite duration” (1939: 55). For such training, there are various ways in Buddhist tradition:
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Hatha Yoga, visualization in Shingon esoteric Buddhism, Zen meditation, and so on. There is the fact that Jung’s discourse about Eastern meditation, dealing with Tibetan Tantrism (1954), Zen Buddhism (1939), the Amita-yurdhyana Sutra (1948) all together, may embarrass the Japanese (Yuasa 1983). There are many sects in Japanese Buddhism. The Amita-yur-dhyana Sutra is one of the most important sutras for The True Pure Land Sect, not an estoteric Buddhist sect; most Japanese people do not refer to the sutra as a way to meditate, as Jung suggested. However, it is true even Japanese people without any specific training or profound knowledge about meditation, like both my patient and I, can easily understand the states of non-ego or non-self, and accept that meditation is the way to salvation. When people reach a serious crisis and their ego-central functions do not work, they often seek something new and they may touch their familial, national, ethnical, and even archetypal images or symbols. Since, as Jung said, we Japanese do not “doubt self liberating power of the introverted mind ” (Jung 1953: 484, original emphasis), when I started to do meditation in front of my patient it seemed natural for us both. According to basic esoteric Buddhism, it is taught that all human beings possess the Innate Buddha-nature, and have the potential to reach enlightenment. Let us return to Yoritomi’s work. He said all people hold the possibility to mystically integrate the sacred and the ordinary when they touch existence through their physical, verbal, and mental experiences. Moreover, under some conditions, people could identify themselves with the whole universe, discovering great delight within The Pure Land of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata (Yoritomi 1988). Such thoughts imply a possibility that ordinary people, like me, under certain conditions can identify with the transcendent or the totality for a moment. In my case, the crisis might have been a good opportunity to open the door to spirituality in a very Eastern way, no-self or no-ego, which I may have unconsciously inherited from my ancestors and absorbed through my daily life as a Japanese person or took in through my long training as a Jungian therapist. When I started to give my attention to Buddhism at the moment my patient and I reached a crisis, when I realized my powerlessness (in Jungian words, when the conscious and the unconscious, outside and inside of the patient and the therapist, time and space constellate without conscious intention), such an image may mystically emerge. I have no evidence for whether I was able to reach being in the form of a non-ego because, as Jung’s mentioned, “there would be nobody to witness” (Jung 1954: 484). It was the only route I could take when I could no longer accept the patient’s intense aggression as a human being. It was a spontaneous response from my Self. Gazing at me, my patient accepted my deed. We both were able to wait for something and were carefully watching for what would happen next without any concern. Then, the image to which I referred as Mahavairocana-tatha-gata occurred in my mind.
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Finally, I would like to explain the meaning of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata. Mahavairocana means Great Sun and Mahavairocana-tatha-gata is the main deity for esoteric Buddhism. It is influenced by the Hindu concept of an original universal creator, and is seen as the symbolic all-embracing being of the mandala and of the universe itself. The Sun does not shine in shadow or at night. However, the radiance of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata is unlimited by time and space because it personifies the Dharma Body, the entire universe, and it is thought to unite the wisdoms and qualities represented separately in the many deities of esoteric Buddhism (Yamasaki 1988). Therefore, Mahavairocana-tatha-gata is always placed at the center of the mandala (Yamasaki 1988: 129). There are two types of mandala: the Tai-zo (womb-repository) and the Kongo-kai (Vajra-Realm) mandalas. Mahavairocana-tatha-gata in the Tai-zo mandala is always represented with Hokkai-join, a hand sign made by myself during the session. Yamasaki said, “Tai-zo means literally ‘womb-repository.’ As a mother enfolds and nurtures a child in her womb, so the energy of compassion nurtures and protects one’s innate enlightenment” (1988: 128). Therefore, the image represents the vast and boundless mercy, and permits the existence of human beings themselves. In my case, by the image, I could accept myself as a powerless therapist. It seems to me from my clinical experience, if people encounter their crisis and are overwhelmed with grief, rage, powerlessness, and loneliness, and they want to progress more, they need to acknowledge such negative feelings in their minds, which may be often unconscious, rather than to escape or deny them. Unless they do, such crises only create new painful traumas. For this, I believe it is helpful in some cases, for people to touch some transcendent or absolute images to accept their negative aspects. This symbol allowed me to hold and contain my counter transferential response to my patient’s rage, which allowed both of us to transform.
References Japanese–English Buddhist Dictionary revised edition (1991), Tokyo: Daito Syuppansya. Jung, C. G. (1953–1973) Collected Works, eds Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and W. McGuire, 20 vols, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mitsumori, M. and Okada, K. (1995) Butuzou Chokoku no Kansho Kisochisiki [Understanding Buddhist sculptures for beginners], Tokyo: Shibundo. Moacanin, R. (2003) The Essence of Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart, Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Nakamura, K. (2008) ‘The image emerging: The therapist’s vision at a crucial point of therapy,’ pp. 132–141 in L. Huskinson (ed.) Dreaming the Myth Onwards: Revisioning Jungian Therapy and Theory, London: Routledge. Sueki, F. (1988) ‘Nihon Bukkyo Sokushin-Jobutsu wo Chusin ni’ [‘Japanese Buddhism around a theory of becoming a Buddha immediately’], pp. 189–219 in M. Nagao,
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T. Idutu, K. Fukunaga, S. Ueyama, M. Hattori, Y. Kajiyama, and J. Takasaki (eds) Higashi Asia no Bukkyo Iwanami Kouza Toyo Shiso, vol.12 [Buddhism in Eastern Asia Iwanami Lecture Series for Eastern Thoughts, vol. 12], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Takasaki, J. (1988) ‘Higashi Asia no Bukkyo Shiso-shi’ [‘A history of Buddhist thoughts in Eastern Asia’], pp. 1–31 in M. Nagao, T. Idutu, K. Fukunaga, S. Ueyama, M. Hattori, Y. Kajiyama, and J. Takasaki (eds) Higashi Asia no Bukkyo Iwanami Kouza Toyo Shiso, vol. 12 [Buddhism in Eastern Asia Iwanami Lecture Series for Eastern Thoughts, vol. 12], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Watanabe, M. (1994) Jung Shinrigaku to Syukyo [Jungian Psychology and Religion], Tokyo: Daisan Bumeisya. Yamasaki, T. (1988) Shingon Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, Boston, MA and London: Shambhala. Yoritomi, M. (1988) Mikkyou Satori to Hotoke eno Michi [Esoteric Buddhism as a way to Buddha and satori], Kodansya-genndai-sinnsyo, Tokyo: Kodansya. Yuasa, Y. (1983) ‘Josetsu Jung ni totteno Toyo’ [‘Foreword: East for Jung’], pp. 3–44 in C. G. Jung, Y. Yuasa, and M. Kuroki (trans.) Toyoteki Meiso no Shinrigaku [Psychology of Eastern Meditation], Osaka: Sogensya.
Chapter 20
The healing properties of a fairy tale David L. Hart
Many fairy tales deal with healing, but few of them present it so specifically as the fairy tale I want to use for the present theme. There is good reason to think that, like myths, fairy tales not only deal with healing, but also carry healing within themselves – that they have a deep restorative function. Thus, the fairy tale we are considering can be seen as being about healing. It can also be seen as conveying it to those who participate in its events. This is one of the reasons why fairy tales – like many dreams, as a matter of fact – have not needed to be interpreted in order to be effective. The story is from the worldwide German collection, Fairy Tales in World Literature, and comes from the Caucasus. It is called ‘The Virgin Queen.’ Once upon a time, there was a king who had become blind and so ill that every one despaired of his life. His three sons offered to go to any lengths to save him. He told them that the only thing that could cure him was fruits from the garden of the Virgin Queen. The eldest son set out on his horse in search of this garden. He traversed many mountains, including the Snow Mountain and the Ice Mountain, and eventually he came upon an old man who was sewing together the splits in the road. He said to the old man, ‘May your work fail’. The old man rejoined, ‘May your work fail’. The eldest son rode on. He came to a garden which had all manner of marvelous fruits, and thought this must be the garden of the Virgin Queen. So he loaded his saddlebags full of fruit and set out jubilantly for home. But when he got there, his father the king said that these were not the fruits: he had often been to that garden in his own youth. The garden of the Virgin Queen was much farther away. So the second son started out on the quest, traversing the Snow Mountain and the Ice Mountain and finally, in turn, coming to the old man sewing together the splits in the road. He said to the old man, ‘May your work fail,’ and the old man answered, ‘May your work fail’. The young man rode on, and came to another garden filled with wonderful fruits. ‘If the Virgin Queen has a garden, this must be it,’ he said to himself. So he loaded his saddlebags with fruits and rode home. But his father said these, too, were
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fruits of a garden he had often visited in his own youth, whereas the garden of the Virgin Queen was much farther away. At last the third son set out in search of the garden. He, too, traversed the Snow Mountain and the Ice Mountain, and finally he came to the old man sewing together the splits in the road. He said to him, ‘May your work succeed’. The old man answered, ‘May your work succeed’. The young man told the old man he was looking for the garden of the Virgin Queen. The old man said he still had a long way to go, after which it would be as far to the Virgin Queen’s garden as to return home. But he told the young man that he would finally see three towers that seemed to touch heaven, one of silver, one of gold, and one of crystal. The Virgin Queen lived in these towers. He advised the young man, when he came to the iron gate of the castle, to open it by hitting it with a nail set in a stick. Then, when he walked on the grass of the garden, he should have grass tied on his feet. And when he plucked the fruit from the trees, he should do so with a stick notched at the end. The young man thanked him and set out, and eventually he came to the Virgin Queen’s castle. When he hit the iron gate with the nail, the gate cried out, ‘Iron is pressing on us’. The Virgin Queen, who was asleep, called to the gate, ‘Well, what would press on iron if not iron? Let me sleep’. She thought one part of the gate was pressing on another. So he entered the garden. As he walked on the grass with the grass bound on his feet, the grass cried out, ‘Grass is pressing on us’. The Virgin Queen replied, ‘What would press on grass if not grass? Let me sleep’. She thought blades of grass were touching each other. And when he plucked the fruit with a stick, the fruit trees called out, ‘Wood is pressing on us’. The Virgin Queen said, ‘What would press on wood if not wood? Let me sleep’. She thought one bough of a tree was knocking on another. So he gathered all the fruits, and was ready to sneak out again. But then he thought, ‘I must see the Virgin Queen for myself, even if it should cost me my life’. He crept into her castle and into the room where she slept. It was a magnificent sight. She lay on a golden bed with candles at her head and feet, and on a table by her bed were laid every kind of food and drink known. The sleeping Virgin Queen had a star on her forehead and the moon under her shoulder, and you could grasp her with one hand, but when you let go, she filled the whole world. The young man tasted of each kind of food and drink. He kissed the Virgin Queen three times and bit her cheek. Then he left. When this son returned to his father and gave him the fruits of the Virgin Queen’s garden, the old king knew that he would get well. Meanwhile, the Virgin Queen woke up. Knowing that something had happened, she asked her mirror what it had seen. The mirror told her of the young prince’s intrusion and of all that he had done. The Virgin Queen arose, summoned the armies of her seven kingdoms, and advanced on the kingdom of the old king. She camped before it and sent word that she wished to see the young man who had plucked the fruits from her garden.
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First the eldest son of the king answered the call, as he wanted to win the Virgin Queen for himself. But when she asked him, ‘How did you pluck the fruit?’ he replied, ‘With my hands, of course’. So she sent him away. Next the second son came to the Virgin Queen, who asked him how he had done it. He said, ‘Why, with my hands’. He too was sent away. Finally, the third son came to her. She asked him how he had plucked her fruit, and he told her of the stick notched at the end. The Virgin Queen acknowledged him as her true suitor. Then, in public view, she kissed him three times, biting him on one cheek, and three more times, biting him on the other cheek – since it was fitting to get back double what had been stolen. Then the young prince and the Virgin Queen went to the old king. She ran her hands over her own face, then over the king’s face and body, and he could see and was as well as ever, in fact strong as a buffalo. The royal pair were married, had sons like the father and daughters like the mother, and lived happily ever after.
Interpretation It is important to understand something of what the old king’s blindness and illness mean. In fairy-tale thought, the king is the center and soul of the spiritual life, and the crisis of his decline is the crisis of spiritual impotence and confusion. It is already obvious, therefore, that a story like this can be immediately relevant at any time, including the present time. It can be absorbed and studied for deep hints as to the nature of spiritual distress and of spiritual healing. When the king has become blind and sick unto death, the whole of life has lost direction and meaning. There is no insight, and there is no vitality. The enormity of this crisis is confirmed by the fact that all of the king’s family, all of his sons, are totally absorbed by the problem. No energy remains for anything but this, the solution to the problem of sickness at the center of life. Already a vital point has been reached, at which ‘something has to give.’ In our personal lives, this is the point when we say, ‘I’ve got to do something about this; this can’t go on.’ The life-and-death crisis is admitted and we are forced to seek a remedy. And thus begins the movement which characterizes the typical fairy tale: The hero’s journey and search. The journey of the hero is often portrayed in our modern terms by going into therapy. But it can have many other forms; common to them all is a search beyond oneself for healing. So the journey, the movement propelled by dire distress, inevitably means discovery, running into things never known or imagined before. And, as a matter of fact, the way in which these new things are understood and met will determine the whole course of the journey – whether it really succeeds or not. We are all on an incredible journey, and a fairy tale like this can help us distinguish the false roads from the true road and give us clues about what
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makes the difference. It very often happens in fairy tales that a lot of effort appears to go to waste in false directions and failure before the true hero or heroine comes along and finds the way, or, indeed, represents the way. This fact, it seems to me, reflects the typical course of healing. We can absolutely exhaust ourselves with all our own ideas and strategies, and these may lull us for quite a while. But if healing, life rather than death, is in question, eventually a whole other order than our own will have to be acknowledged and accepted. Let us see how our story bears out this fact. The very first response to the crisis of the king is the essential commitment to healing at whatever cost, the total devotion of the three sons. This leads at once to the journey of the eldest son in search of the mythical ‘Virgin Queen’s’ garden. So the goal, however nebulous, has already been set forth: Fruits with curative power in the hands of a supreme being who is characterized as virgin, that is, never yet ‘known’ by man. This characteristic is vitally important: An encounter never before experienced. This will constitute, in fact, the test of failure or of success in the whole enterprise. The eldest son is our first attempt to find a solution, and he is highly motivated and dedicated. He endures many hardships, many bleak mountains. But he fails to pass a crucial test. When he comes upon an old man sewing together the splits in the road, he wishes him failure in his task and he gets the same wish in return. So does the second son when his turn comes. Both of them end up in fruit gardens which, however marvelous, are not new – have already been known to the old king since his youth. What is the old man doing? He is drawing into one all the diversified directions of the road, creating a single way. He is making the simple out of the complex and the single out of the many. The two elder brothers, in their resistance to his way, represent our typically divided, ambivalent, dualistic mind. In wishing failure to the single way, this mind condemns itself to a bypath of self-deception. So what the old man gives back to both young men is nothing but their own self-limitation. If the quest for healing is pursued with a divided mind, there will be no healing, only a temporary delusion of healing. If our ‘normal’ mind is unwilling to sacrifice itself, it will get back only what is already known, stale and profitless – the fruits of gardens long familiar to the king and long barren of effect. We can all think of such developments in our quest, times of self-created disillusionment which leave us as needy as before and bring no genuine healing. But it seems as though this bitter experience of false healing is necessary to clear the road for the true. After the two older brothers, in their pride, have failed, along comes the youngest son with an entirely different attitude. As he arises after the elder sons, it can be said that the true way emerges out of the bankruptcy of the false – that self-will must be cleared out before the real movement can begin.
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He, of course, wishes the old man success, and he gets back the same wish, which is to say: “You will succeed because you are at one with my way.” True to this prediction, the young man engages the old man to help him, and receives from him the indispensable advice which also illuminates anew the essential attitude in the healing way. Let us look at the instructions and try to understand how they enable the young prince to succeed in his quest. First of all, it is a very long way, far longer than the self-limiting older brothers ever dreamed. That is to say, it is far beyond the world previously known. Second, the goal is first recognized by three extremely impressive and imposing towers of precious metals, the dwelling of the Virgin Queen. So the first glimpse of the healing world is one that could throw you back in awe, and you need to get over this reaction and enter it anyway. You must not let yourself be bewitched by the beauty and power of the source of healing. The implicit advice to the hero is essential because it is so easy to think that healing is ‘beyond us,’ beyond our grasp, beyond any possibility of real experience; and the fairy tale is saying just the opposite. It is saying that the real solution does wait for us, waits to be awakened and brought into life like the sleeping Virgin Queen. It is also saying that the healing garden of the Virgin Queen is accessible, and tells us how. The hero is instructed at each point to wear or carry the very substance which he is to meet; iron to meet iron, grass to meet grass, and wood to meet wood. This, as we see, insures that the Virgin Queen who sleeps through his visit will not be awakened, for she keeps assuming that the outcries from her garden pertain to substances already there and not to a foreign intrusion. In other words, the hero is able to take on the nature of that which he encounters, and in the process to disappear within it. It is just as if he were invisible, and of course that is the skill of many similar fairy-tale heroes entering unknown lands. Countless times in the course of my work as a psychotherapist, I have come to realize the incomparable value of an attitude to the client that lets the person emerge as herself or himself. This is not so self-evident as it may seem, since we carry prejudices and expectations into every encounter, and to meet the other with the other – as the hero meets iron with iron – offers a new kind of realization. It is as if someone is saying, ‘Yes, it really exists.’ The person begins to feel himself or herself emerge without distortion. An inner life that has felt walled off and formidable, like the overpowering towers of the Virgin Queen, begins to become accessible and natural like the opened garden. The presence of the hero or heroine in forbidden, bewitched places in the fairy tale signifies the entrance of a new, pure awareness into a hitherto ‘closed system’ which could be roughly equated with what Jung understands by the complex. This awareness must be pure – that is, the hero must put away his personal quirks and limitations – or else there will be a reaction of fear and defensiveness; that is, the Virgin Queen will wake up. It is vital that this entrance into the ‘forbidden’ territory be made without bias, pressure, or any
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thought of gain; the only aim being to reveal it to itself – one might almost say: to give it itself. So the counsel of the old man in our story is to give to whatever one meets its own nature, pure and undisguised. As a healing attitude this kind of neutrality – whatever its limitations in other relationships – can have unexpected power in therapy. A man with whom I had worked for some months said to me suddenly one day, “You must be doing some kind of magic.” He meant that he could not account for the basic rise in self-esteem that had established him on a new level in all areas of his life. I account for this by my persistent, unprejudiced awareness of his true worth, which simply allows that truth to manifest itself. The process is so simple that it is hard to believe, but then, as we saw, the old man in our story stands for simplicity. But if the way to healing is opened by an attitude of giving what is met its true nature, the reality of healing as this story abundantly shows, quite eludes the human grasp. Indeed, our hero can make no claim to any possession of the Virgin Queen even when he sneaks into her presence. The story explicitly says that you can grasp her in one hand, but when you let go, she fills the whole world. Besides having cosmic properties of star and moon on her person, she is therefore also impossible to define or limit. She has the attributes of God. The hero has thus come upon the source of life with its quite indescribable marvels, one expression of which is the table laid with every known variety of food and drink. This is the place of everlasting abundance, the place where life is finally found to be without lack of any kind. For that, it seems to me, is what is revealed to the young man: the real nature of life. And it is revealed only to his attitude, which is that of letting it come forth as it is. His visit to the Virgin Queen, made spontaneously and regardless of the consequences, is that of a lover, of one who adores the presence of the beloved, and who consequently seeks nothing but to be with her. His impulse carries him way beyond his instructions, which were simply to secure the fruits of the garden. He is really after the total transformation of life through union with the divine. Behind the healing substance itself – behind the fruits of the garden – lies the one who heals, the Virgin Queen. And as the story reveals, healing itself will not be complete until she comes to make life truly whole. So the adoration and daring of the hero prove to be essential to the achievement of the goal. His father certainly receives every promise of recovery when the son returns with the fruits; but it will, after all, depend on the personal presence of the Virgin Queen to make the work complete. In many fairy tales as in this one, there comes a point at which the human work of the hero has reached its ultimate. He has gone as far as he can go, done all that he can do, and he withdraws, sometimes in total despair, and sometimes, as here, in satisfaction and expectation. At that point of change, a new kind of energy, quite beyond any human effort, becomes mobilized. Life,
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one could say, begins to move of itself. But this happens when a channel has been opened by that persistent awareness of truth – the hero’s attitude – which is the hallmark of the healing work. Thus, it is not correct to say either that healing is totally out of our hands, or that it depends entirely on our work. It is rather, as our story reveals, an awakening to the real order of things. The interesting point is that the healing power, in this tale, awakens to itself, as the Virgin Queen, on waking up, consults her mirror. This power has been lying dormant, latent, awaiting the intrusion of a pure consciousness that will give it the efficacy that it truly has. When we say that a person does not realize his or her potential, we are recognizing this fact, that the healing capacity lies there, ready to awaken to itself. We sense, in ourselves and others, great possibilities that wait for this realization, and, one way or another, we seek to further their emergence. We are all healing agents in an infinite variety of ways. So while the hero withdraws back to his father’s kingdom, the Virgin Queen is brought into action, consolidating and concentrating her power – the armies of her seven kingdoms. Like the previous cosmic and divine references to her person, this one, too, is meant to stress her more-than-human nature, the overwhelming power that lies in her hands. And all that power is to be focused, not on destruction or even on creating fear, but solely on healing. This reveals conclusively that any ‘negative’ traits thought to have been possessed by the Virgin Queen were in fact illusions of human vision. That fact is vitally important in our approach to the way of healing. Because what we must call divine power is in question here, its aspects from the human point of view may be imposing if not terrifying. The infinitely high towers, the walled-off castle, the Queen’s brooding presence that must not be disturbed – all these correspond to that experience of archetypal energy which Jung calls the ‘numinous.’ But note well that none of these aspects of the Virgin Queen deters the hero in the slightest from his quest. By his actions he is stating, in effect, that these apparent hindrances to knowing her are just not the essential point about her – that there is a way beyond appearances and to the heart of the matter. That statement is what releases her in her true essence. All of these ‘negative’ elements are what create a false distance, whereas the whole point of real healing is union. We are blocked from it when we grant to ourselves or others an imposing character, derived from our fear of the unknown reality. As the old king in our story is not served by this fear, neither are we. We are served by loving penetration into the true order of things – that vision which can say: this apparent remoteness, pride, defensiveness is not the truth at all; there is the wonder and wealth of a person to be discovered here. Out of that discovery, reconciliation and divine healing emerge. In our story, such a union is under way as the Virgin Queen brings her forces to the very borders of the old king’s land. Before she can enter this land
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– that is, before the healing can be complete – she has to conduct a final test to distinguish the true from the false heroes. In other words, she cannot enter into a consciousness that cannot receive her. Again, as always, the efficacy of real healing depends vitally on the attitude that comes to meet it. The divine and the human seem to stand in this eternal dialectic relation to each other. She asks each of the two elder sons how he picked the fruits from her garden, and each one responds with the ‘logical’ answer: how else would one pick fruit than with one’s hands? However, in this case it is not the right answer. The third son is the one who knows and who tells about using the stick notched at the end. By this answer he is recognized as the true suitor and bridegroom of the Virgin Queen. What he is being asked to affirm is not only the bare facts of his mission. He is also acknowledging that healing is not obtained by ‘my’ grasp at all – that it comes forth by being given its own reality and truth. By this affirmation the young man proves that he represents the conscious attitude that alone can entertain healing power. Fairy tales have a complete logic of their own and speak about definite spiritual laws. This one speaks, as so many do, about the conditions under which the human and the beyond-human can come together in the state of healing that is the birthright of our existence. As the Virgin Queen has now entered into the old kingdom, the end of the story is a foregone conclusion. The king is healed as a matter of course, that is, the crisis of failed energy and sight is past. And by joining with the hero, she assures fruits of a new kind, the issue from their marriage which attests to the potency of this state of oneness. For healing and union always bear such fruits as undeniable proof of the abundance of life.
Chapter 21
Breaking the spells of self How insights from fairy tales and Buddhist psychology can be applied in therapeutic practice James Mathews Grant
Oh man, if you only knew that you are free. It is your ignorance of your freedom which is your captivity. Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Why do we remain ignorant of our freedom, and why is it so elusively difficult to release ourselves from this fundamental misperception of our true nature? What keeps us from simply untying the neurotic knots which chronically constrict our being? Sometimes a person’s life will configure around a central galvanizing question. From an early age Einstein was fascinated by the question, ‘What is light?’ The insistent question for me has been, ‘What is the relationship between seeing ourselves and being free?’ I have pursued this open-ended inquiry psychologically, creatively, and spiritually, wherever it led me. I remember my earliest intuitive recognition of the possibility that I could live more freely. I was talking to my first therapist about some seemingly insoluble problem when the clear realization came that I could at any moment step out of my personal patterns of captivity, there was nothing but the power of illusion stopping me. After telling him what I was experiencing, he looked at me surprised and responded, “If you really know that, then you don’t need therapy.” Now, I more fully understand, after many years of being a psychotherapist myself, that he was right. But I also have come to realize that what you do need therapy for is to help you learn how to recognize and begin to release your potential freedom. My interest in spell psychology was awakened through an early Jungian training analysis with Dr David Hart. David showed me how to look at fairy tales from a therapeutic perspective as “not only being about healing, but carrying healing within themselves for those who participate in their events” (Hart 2001: 37). I wanted to know how to break the mysterious hold of spells which obstruct individuation, mutual intimacy, creativity, and movement toward spiritual realization. Fairy tales provided me with a symbolic methodology awaiting clinical translation. I believe the insights contained in these
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narratives of transformational healing are an important key to understanding the hidden mechanism of human neurosis. With remarkable acuity, fairy tales experientially describe the process of spell recognition and release. ‘Spell’ is a magical, unscientific-sounding word we usually associate with superstition, childlike wish-fulfillment, and primitive religion. And yet we still use the language of casting a spell, breaking a spell, or feeling spellbound. Something of the powerful reality these statements convey continues to survive deep in our collective unconscious memory. We may have lost cultural touch with the healing function of fairy tales, but the modern psyche is no less susceptible to spells than the archaic psyche. The word spell as I use it is a descriptive metaphor for neurologically interwoven patterns of perception, emotion, and behavior. Perception is primary here, because emotional and behavioral patterns are predicated on how we see reality. Neuroses of all kinds operate with exactly the same self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing, self-deceptive, and self-negating spell-like mechanism. Based on applied meditation principles, Open State Psychotherapy is a systematic model I developed for learning how to recognize and release these patterns. Anyone who tries to change or become more self-aware comes up against the discouraging power of the spell. Without knowing it, we are all under spells of some kind, which have a pervasive shaping influence on our lives and sense of identity. A spell is that which has the power to condition perception, and unconsciously control our psychological functioning. Feeling spellbound is like an autosuggestive trance state which overrides autonomous choice. You can’t break it if you are under its influence, no matter how hard you try. For this reason conscious recognition must always precede release. Pattern release involves the relaxation of our naturally creative will. Will, being understood here ontologically, is a bringing forth into new being. As D. T. Suzuki wrote, “to be is to will, and so to become” and, “the rivers flow – this is their will” (Suzuki et al. 1963: 51). Practicing a relaxed state of openness releases life energy from its containment in repetitive patterns. All feelings will flow toward healing, transformation, and intimacy if we let them. When facing a perceived threat or problem, however, our reactive tendency is to constrict. It’s difficult to trust that even the tightest emotional knots in our being will untie themselves if we stop tugging at them and simply notice how we keep retying them. The spell is totally predictable, and this is its obvious weakness. We only have to look at past patterns to anticipate how we will react to similar circumstances. As Benjamin Franklin observed, “to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is surely the definition of insanity.” Yet, for some strange reason it never occurs to us we could do it differently by responding instead of reacting. Part of this inability to respond is the feeling of having no choice in the matter. When asked the obvious question, how could you do it differently, otherwise resourceful and intelligent clients will
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insist they can’t imagine how, go blank, and feel incapable of attempting the simplest suggested alternatives. Like our will, our capacity for creative imagination atrophies under the chronic disempowering influence of the spell. When properly understood, the spell is not malevolent or antagonistic towards our well-being. The spell is a survival-based dysfunctional coping mechanism which tries to protect us by negating us. It is extremely difficult to recognize because it operates unconsciously, and resists being made conscious. It also seems counterintuitive, as it employs a reverse logic which defends against positive possibilities while reinforcing negative belief and behavior patterns. In this way, it seeks to keep us in a virtual state of un-freedom, where meaningful change seems impossible. I like to playfully refer to it as an ‘obstacle delusion.’ There are three universal spells of self from which all personal spell variations are derived. These are, in order of causal priority: 1 2 3
the Root Spell of Self-Perception, which is cast by karmic conditioning, and broken by seeing the self as essentially empty; the Archetypal Spell of Self, which is cast by unconscious possession, and broken by seeing the self symbolically; the Developmental Spell of Self, which is cast by formative intimacy dynamics, and broken by seeing the self intersubjectively.
The Root Spell of Self-Perception The eye altering, alters all. (William Blake, The Mental Traveler from Blake 1977: 145) Liberation is nothing else than awareness of our own true nature. (Baker 2000: 114) Like Buddhist psychology, Open State Psychotherapy is based on the radical assumption of intrinsic unconditional freedom. Buddhism is a way of seeing reality as it is, free of all mental distortion. From the Buddhist perspective of non-duality, the self is regarded as an empty perceptual construct. At the root of the Spell of Self-Perception is the illusion of duality. In ordinary perception there is a subject–object split. It is precisely this dichotomy, which constitutes what Richard De Martino calls the predicament of the self in ego consciousness: “As subject, the egoic self can, in the freedom of its subjectivity, ever rise above and transcend itself. Yet, as subject it has not the freedom, as ego, to transcend its subject–object structure as such. Object-dependent and object-conditioned, the ego is further object obstructed. Ever in search of, yet ever illusive to itself, the ego attempts to have and know itself merely as object, never in its full individuality as subject” (Suzuki et al. 1963: 144–145).
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This dualistic condition, which is the source of neurotic suffering, is called ignorance (Avidya). Subject to the karmic law of cause and effect, the insecure ego continually attempts to prove it exists and is worthy of existence. Buddhism teaches such fear and desire-driven behavior isn’t necessary because our true nature, which is non-dual presence of awareness, is already effortlessly there, beyond hope and fear: You only need to recognize it. The Zen Master Rinzai said, “there is one true man, if you have not yet borne witness to him, look, look!” (Suzuki et al. 1963: 32). We cannot comprehend his puzzling instruction if we are focused on the five form qualities of self-perception which cause us to see ourselves as solid, separate, permanent, continuous, and defined. Under the Spell of Self-Perception we mistakenly identify with and believe in personally defining, and selflimiting, patterns which continue to reinforce its existence. Because we see self as form, we try to cling to it while avoiding what we perceive as the identity-threatening qualities of emptiness. Seen in the mirror of emptiness, however, self-awareness is fluid instead of solid, interdependent instead of separate, instantaneous instead of permanent, unpredictable instead of continuous, and unconditional instead of defined. Empty self-awareness is open, present, clear, creative, and therefore essentially free. But to the emptiness-threatened ego, it seems safer to take refuge in neurotic non-being, a self that can’t be itself, than to face the spacious openness of our true nature, which in Buddhist psychology is called no-self. It is not that self is nonexistent, but rather it does not exist as it appears to ordinary perception. For this reason I have found it helpful in working with Western clients to translate the terms self/no-self, as spell-self/free-self, and emptiness as openness. Presented as free-self, no-self becomes less aversively threatening and culturally unfamiliar. No-self is understood clinically here to mean no neurotic determinism. From the perspective of openness, no-self can be further interpreted as no identification with either the five form qualities, or skandas (form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness) or personal patterns which substantiate our self-perception. Transcending dualistic conditioning by recognizing our true nature liberates self-awareness from its imprisonment in self-perception. Now your original face before you were born is free to show itself, and know itself for the first time in its unobscured, unobstructed reality as absolute subjectivity. Free to creatively arise, free to transformatively dissolve, leaving no karmic trace, the way ripples move on the surface of water. The primordially pure mirror of emptiness reveals self as it is. This transperceptual principle is the golden thread of vision, which integrates all three levels of Open State Psychotherapy. In the Heart Sutra it is affirmed that, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” This is not theory but something we need to learn how to see. But achieving non-dual vision through meditation practice and direct teacher/
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student transmission exceeds the appropriate purpose and scope of psychotherapy. As therapists we can only work with the neurotic implications of self-perception indirectly, at the relative level of compassionate activity. I do believe, however, it is possible to practice psychotherapy in a distinct preparatory way which loosens the hold of karmic ignorance on our lives, while pointing beyond itself to the ultimate work of self-liberation. Open State Psychotherapy focuses on pattern recognition and release, nothing more.
The Archetypal Spell of Self The archetypal image decides the fate of man. (Jung and Jacobi 1978: 39) Shakespeare saw the symbolic nature of the human psyche with great clarity when he wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Out of the empty potentialities of mind mysteriously arises the imaginal field of self-awareness. From the perspective of Jungian psychology, this dream of self has its origin in the unconscious activity of the archetypes. Jung sees archetypes as living forces to be taken with ultimate seriousness: “The archetype is a primordial image which expresses the intrinsic and unconditioned creative power of the psyche” (Jung and Jacobi 1978: 43). These self-narrative symbols are not mere imaginings, but tremendously powerful psychic influences. Jung warns that “their violation has as its consequence the perils of the soul” (Jung and Jacobi 1978: 43). In their purposeful aspect, archetypes act as catalysts of individual destiny. In their spell aspect, “they are the infallible cause of neurotic and even psychotic disorders” (Jung and Jacobi 1978: 43). For Jung, the truest life is the inner symbolic life of the soul. Fairy tales tell the timeless story of the soul’s adventure, in which heroes and heroines undertake the daunting task of achieving personal wholeness through archetypal integration. As I learned from David Hart, every fairy tale depicts a series of ‘fateful encounters’ with the strange and less attractive aspects of our selves. How you relate to these encounters is crucial to whether you will succeed or fail. Are you dismissive, or respectful; curious, or closed? Do you project them outside of yourself, or recognize and embrace them as valuable aspects of your larger identity? The fairy tale is not told through the eyes of the ego, necessitating a disorienting reversal of perspective. The unconscious must be related to on its own terms, and allowed to symbolically guide the hero’s progress. It is the self as archetype that is the teller of the tale, and caster of the spell upon the conscious mind. By casting the spell, the self-archetype initiates the process of seeking individuation. This spell is cast in order to cure us, the cure being to make whole and release each person’s unique potential. Breaking the spell at this level is directly related to the work of selfrealization that Jung described as individuation. This is the deeper work of
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dis-spellment, which is not about healing the perceived symptoms of the ego, but reversing the unrecognized effects of archetypal possession which appear in the mysterious guise of complexes. Complexes can take over a person’s life to such an extent that the individual can feel unable to act or decide, or conversely be driven to distraction or self-destructive behaviors. Put succinctly, it is not that you have a complex, but the complex has you. Activated by life experiences, enchantment, and bewitchment are the positive and negative poles of archetypal possession. The effect of enchantment is a magical sense of specialness, wherein lies its seductive power. The possessed person feels that to separate from the archetype, or the outer object of the archetype’s projection, would mean psychological death, experienced as a loss of soul. When enchantment happens, the concerns of ordinary life fade into the background, and the possessed person finds himself or herself suddenly playing Tristan or Isolde. The contrary effect of bewitchment is a disempowering sense of worthlessness, reinforced by self-judgement. As David Hart said, “An absolute certainty of doom is the hallmark of the state of bewitchment” (Hart 2001: 91). Clients often say, “why keep trying, when I know it’s never going to work?” It is as if they have been negatively transformed into their opposite. They feel as though they have lost connection with, and are unable to recognize or ever be themselves. The cowardly lion and the prince who is turned into a beast are well-known metaphorical examples. Having surrendered the freedom to function autonomously, the spell-self takes refuge in specialness or worthlessness as a way of escaping from the task of authentic individuation. Unaware of such collective influences, the clients believe that the spell drama they are in is unique to them. Finding a tale that matches their experience gives an empowering sense of meaning and purpose to what they are going through. It isn’t just unconsciously happening to them, they are choosing to play the part, and make it their own. For fate to turn to freedom, the archetypal patterns must be consciously and creatively performed. To paraphrase another well-known Shakespearean quote, it is the performance, not the play, that is the thing, wherein we act the slave or the king. Although breaking the spell of possession is necessary from the standpoint of facilitating individuation, it does not sufficiently address how the spell operates in the realm of interpersonal dynamics. Through archetype-centered analysis we may gain greater self-knowledge, but we are still not free to be in the world more openly. For this to happen, another completing level of work needs to occur in the alchemical intimacy of the healing relationship.
The Developmental Spell of Self Where was I when I needed me? (Anonymous client)
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Fairy-tale wisdom teaches us that a spell is cast in childhood on our capacity to be intimate with ourselves and others; an ambivalent spell of longing and dread, romantic enchantment and alienating bewitchment. No matter how happy or content we are with our partners, most committed relationships experience varying degrees of spell complication along the way. Some are healthy enough to survive on their own merits. Many couples become resigned to a lesser expectation of intimacy, or eventually get divorced. Intimacy is what we long for consciously, and defend against unconsciously. This is what I call the primary intimacy conflict. Couples in therapy are surprised to learn they have a strong tendency to resist intimacy itself. Blind to the emotionally distancing effect of the spell, they fixate on the limitations of their partners or themselves as the source of their relational difficulties. This ambivalence makes no sense until we recognize what we are really defending against is the fear associated with being vulnerable. As the word indicates, vulnerability is an ability, the ability to be open, and yet we treat it as if it were a dangerous disability to be avoided at all cost. Real intimacy requires a mutual exchange of vulnerability in which both people are open to giving and receiving. But we may have negative past associations with how it felt to be vulnerable in a defenceless and dependent way as children. Developmental wounds are intimacy wounds inflicted in formative family dynamics which remain painfully unresolved. Having internalized these dynamics, we continue to repeat them in subsequent relationships. Fearful of re-experiencing past trauma, our defended wound becomes an impenetrable shield, preventing access to the free state of open intimate space. The spell tries to protect us by making us invulnerable. By doing so it keeps us at a dissociative distance from that which makes us potentially vulnerable: reconnecting with and sharing our true needs and feelings. Even if you love someone, you can’t let them get closer to you than you can get to yourself. Self-intimacy is the precondition for shared intimacy. Often the problem in love relationships which aren’t working is there is not enough self-intimacy to support, much less tolerate, shared intimacy. Dissociation is the involuntary experience of separating from yourself. It is a way of escaping from feeling helplessly trapped if there is no other coping strategy available. When you dissociate, your real self goes unconscious, and is unable to be present. If you are not there, a traumatic experience can’t hurt you. And so you numb all bodily sensation, block out memory, and disconnect from self-intimacy. But to ensure total safety you can’t ever let ‘the other,’ as someone who could hurt you again, be there either. This pattern of permanently blocking vulnerability can only be broken by reversing the two-fold dissociation from self and other. In this way we can become present again in the presence of the other, and available to relational change. As Gabriel Marcel wrote, “He who loves me discovers me to myself through his presence” (Friedman 1967: 283). It is the client’s
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guarded vulnerable self which the therapist, as agent of release, must gain access to through his or her own modeling of openness. Consciously entered together, the wounded place becomes the healing place of real meeting. Developing mutual openness requires committed partners who are willing to participate in a process of co-transformative engagement. Disappearance under a spell is a common theme in fairy tales. We get a clear description of how it works in this excerpt from the traditional Scottish tale of Tamlane: “when Tamlane and Byrd Janet were young they loved one another and plighted their troth. But when the time came near for their marrying, Tamlane disappeared, and none knew what had become of him” (Hart 2001: 83). Refusing to accept her beloved had deserted her, Byrd Janet goes looking for him in the woods, where he suddenly appears, having briefly escaped his unconscious spell captivity. In great distress he explains, “when I was out riding, a deep drowsiness fell upon me and when I awoke I was in Elfland” (Hart 2001: 83). Having heard his helpless lament, she responded “tell me if aught I can do will save you” (Hart 2001: 91). Tamlane explains that on Hallow’s Eve the earth will open, and there will be a procession of the Elfin court to celebrate his marriage to their queen. As I ride by, you must spring upon me, and I will fall to the ground, then seize me quick and whatever change befall me, cling hold to me until they turn me into a red hot iron, plunge it in the water, then cast your green mantle over me, and I shall be yours, and be of the [conscious relational] world again. (Hart 2001: 91) Byrd Janet follows his instructions, staying safely in a circle of holy water as the elves all came around and tried to exercise their magic upon him. They alternately change him into pairs of opposite; one moment a snake poised to strike, the next an elusive adder. But all their spells were in vain. Then Tamlane emerged from the water as ‘a mother naked son,’ free of the developmental spell that bound him to his mother. We see in this dramatic scene how his spell resists release from dissociation. Such resistance becomes particularly strong in opposing the possible agent of release, be it a loving partner, or a psychotherapist. One client who came to see me had a pattern of leaving relationships approximately three months after they began. He was a caring, sensitive man who wanted to have a committed relationship, but despaired of ever being able to do so. In the beginning of each attempt he thought he had met the right person, and was sure this time it would be different. Then the same script played out again, line and verse. He found himself becoming distrustful, increasingly critical of his partner, and finally having to reject her and leave. The turning point came when he realized he needed to return to the loving
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woman his spell was defending against, and commit to going through the playing out of his patterns consciously with her this time. Like Tamlane, before anything else was possible, he had to recognize his spell enough to name it to his partner, and acknowledge he could not free himself without her help. This meant both of them steadfastly embracing his conflictual behaviors as he tried to escape and push her away. I’m happy to say they did not let go, and were married thereafter. Breaking the hold of spell patterns is a lifelong process. Although there are certain turning points along the way, spell recognition and release is a daily practice which happens anew in the moment of consciously choosing to be free or un-free, to open to life or remain closed. The psychotherapeutic goal is for the client to develop spell mastery. This means an increasing ability to transform the spell instead of being controlled by it. Fairy tales offer us a challenging, but far from pessimistic, perspective on becoming free. When we feel hopelessly stuck, it is so encouraging to remember that for all the resistance of the spell, and its seductive longing for lasting enchantment, “Tamlane has eyes and he has a heart, and it is our human fate that our eyes shall finally see, and our heart understand reality” (Hart 2001: 94). If I could distill what I have learned as a therapist, and seek to more fully realize as a Buddhist practitioner, I would sum it up in four simple words: See and be free.
References Baker, I. W. (2000) The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple: Tantric Wall Hangings from Tibet, New York: Thames and Hudson. Blake, W. (1977) ‘The mental traveler’, p. 145 in The Portable William Blake, ed. A Kazin, New York: Viking Penguin. Friedman, M. (1967) To Deny Our Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Man, New York: Delacorte Press. Hart, D. L. (2001) The Water of Life: Spiritual Renewal in the Fairy Tale, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Jung, C. G. (1953–1973) Collected Works, eds Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and W. McGuire, 20 vols, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jung, C. G. and Jacobi, J. (1978) Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905–1961, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Khan, Pir Vilayat Inayat (2007) The Rapture of Being. Online, available from http:// www.intuition.org/txt/khan.htm (accessed 24 April 2007). Suzuki, D. T., Fromm, E., and De Martino, R. (1963) Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, New York: Grove Press.
Part VIII
Re-introduction
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Chapter 22
Oscillations Reload Paul C . Cooper
To relieve ourselves of suffering, we must learn the path of bringing suffering to the forefront. Reverend Soun Hoshi (From a plaque at the entrance to Kodai-ji Temple in Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto, Japan)
For me the integration of Zen (or any religion for that matter) and psychoanalysis is a deeply personal, internal endeavor evolving from the sincere, intense, and prolonged practice of both. Shifts in theory and technique are secondary. They derive from this primary experiential base. They constitute a highly subjective autobiographical narrative. With this primacy of experience in mind, I intend to speak from a personal vantage point and offer this chapter as an experiment in dialogue. I hope to amplify and extend points raised in my previous discussion of oscillations (Cooper 2004). The experience of oscillation functions as a loose structure from which I will weave in and out. Specifically, I intend to demonstrate autobiographically and through the use of clinical material how Zen practice can engender experiences which can then be processed through the lens of psychoanalytic training and psychotherapy. Such processing, through self-analysis, zazen, work with a Zen Master, and through the dialogue which occurs in personal psychoanalysis can contribute to deepened Zen practice. Both practices, when fully embraced, can operate synergistically and can exert a mutually enriching dynamic.
First steps Zen practice, for me, consists of a series of oscillations occurring with infinite fluctuations in pitch, speed, depth, and intensity. Zen touches lightly; I touch back and then bounce away. Previously, I noted that:
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These encounters occurred years apart. Such oscillations give the impression of straight lines, leading nowhere, like so many new interests, that one peeks into. Yet, like deeply planted seeds they remain buried, and germinate out of sight until they sprout and blossom as oscillations deepen, diminish and repeat. With deepening involvement microoscillations appeared woven into the fabric of wider arcs such as in the fluctuations in intensity, duration and frequency of sitting meditation. Initially, I would sit occasionally, for brief periods of time, perhaps ten to fifteen minutes at most. Over the years, I developed a daily practice of one or more forty-five minute sitting periods. These daily “sits” further intensified on retreats. At other times, I might find myself stopping this practice, or I might practice and notice a diminished intensity or a lack of clarity and focus. (Cooper 2004: 233–234) With passing time, practice ebbs and flows; major ebbs occur; ebbs that could not have been imagined, dreamed of, thought about, that leave practice seemingly annihilated. Minus practice, states of mind deepen. Where is the ‘I told you so ego’? The ‘I got it made mind’? Washed away, bit by bit, eroded into non-practice states; mind dulled, neglected kitchen knife mind. Oscillations slow to almost a crawl, caught in sludge seemingly at a standstill as movements become imperceptible. Rusty mechanical mind moments. Zendo, zazen, Sangha mindfulness drifts becoming distant . . . Can the distinction between discipline and habit be discerned? Can wonder and doubt balances be maintained in the liminal space at the still point? Are the sides one might tip over and into abysses to be encountered and negotiated? Where does one step off a ‘50-foot pole,’ the curb, the abyss? Can unavoidable descents into deadness be tolerated or must oscillations only be charted through observed, felt, lived movements? How much aliveness is required before oscillations become perceptible? Stillness/deadness oscillations. The Zen Master shouts ‘Be still!’ He also admonishes that ‘A still mind is a dead mind!’ Morning church bells ring defined only by the silences in between. What is the distance between feeling skinned alive and ‘I got you covered’? Enthusiasm waxes and wanes. I would simply notice time passing and fabricate daydreams to get through the boredom and through an infinite meditation session, all the while taking mind leaps into the anticipated future of the closing bell’s welcome ring. At other points of intensified sitting, states of timelessness ensue. I am told that all of these oscillating states are valid aspects of practice, not to be judged, embraced, or dismissed. So, sitting continues. Ah, enlightenment, Throw it away! After all these years—
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Arthritis in every joint; Black crows at dawn. Initially, cynicism feeds and rationalizes an intense resistance to psychoanalysis. Cynicism masks anxiety and mobilizes aggression. Cynicism crystallizes into intellectualized, poorly thought-out cliché critiques of Freud’s shortcomings – as if Freud were the alpha and the omega of psychoanalysis. Cynicism kills nascent wonder sparks and psychically shreds to pieces the white-shirt, paisley tie, uptown shrink and keeps me out of the desperately needed, albeit denied treatment (see Cooper 2002). Yet when overtaken by the growing awareness of lived-in-the-moment suffering, psychoanalysis, once entered, becomes a smooth, steadily deepening process. Once entered, in contrast to my Zen practice, psychoanalysis – despite periods of the turbulence and the pain that led me to the couch – has always felt steadier than my initial plunges into Zen. As I noted previously, since my first encounter, I simply stayed with it with few interruptions. Thus, despite their presence, psychotherapy’s oscillations often remain unnoticed, unconscious, or evolve in arcs too wide to perceive close up. Yet, oscillations certainly do occur between hope and despair, feeling in pieces and wholeness, agitation and equipoise, aliveness and deadness, to name a few. (Cooper 2004: 234) Oscillations draw momentum from both inner and outer sources. Most predominant were my longings that continue to consist of a bittersweet blend of wonder, doubt, passion, deadness, sadness, elation, joy, and pain. When attended to over time, both painful and joyous aspects of longings begin to exert a different kind of impact. They lose their threatening feel and paradoxically intensify adding energy, richness, and meaning to life, no longer perceived as something dangerous and toxic. Rather, whatever emerges can be accepted. My deepest longings ultimately expressed a matter of life and death urgency. With passing time the resulting encounters began to touch an emerging gnawing desire to get at ‘the something’ or ‘the no-thing’ inside of myself.
Suffering Simply put, suffering motivated me to pursue Zen and psychoanalysis. It would be a lie to claim otherwise. Wilfred Bion (1970: 9) notes: There are patients whose contact with reality presents the most difficulty when that reality is their own mental state . . . people exist who are so intolerant of pain or frustration (or in whom pain or frustration is so intolerable) that they feel the pain but will not suffer it and so cannot
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be said to discover it . . . The patient who will not suffer pain fails to ‘suffer’ pleasure and this denies the patient the encouragement he might otherwise receive from accidental or intrinsic relief. Bion’s psychotherapy demands suffering the pain that exists for both self and other. From a similar perspective, Vivienne Joyce (2002: 110) writes: If human beings are to acquire a little more respect for suffering, the demand is to be truthful about misery and catastrophe. Respect for suffering is the path to transformation and is essential to both the treatment and the cure. Buddhism acknowledges the primacy of suffering in Duhkha (suffering), the first of the Four Noble Truths. The Bodhisattva vow acknowledges the suffering of both self and other. In the context of the notion of forbearance, the Zen teacher, Robert Aitken (1997: 50), points out that “. . . suffering is an ambiguous word that can also mean permission.” Quoting the New Testament, Aitken writes: Suffer the little children to come unto me, Jesus said. Let it come, let it happen. The whole world is sick; the whole world suffers and its beings are constantly dying. Duhkha, on the other hand, is resistance to suffering. It is the anguish we feel when we don’t want to suffer. (1997: 50) This constant, ambiguous ‘something inside’ that I felt was, at the time, the best I could do to describe the nameless depths of my own suffering. ‘Something inside’ perhaps serves as a compromise for what can and cannot be said about what might or might not be felt. The capacity for suffering, and even naming suffering, gets buried under layers of self-deception. This observation finds expression often enough, perhaps so often that it becomes meaningless. Overuse can strip language of its meaning and impact. Whatever can be said about what might be numbed out and what might be felt becomes safely reduced to cliché. However, despite the many ways one might conceptualize, articulate, buffer, or neutralize experience, suffering remains real. At stake is one’s capacity for experiencing suffering, which might or might not have been developed, derailed, damaged, deformed, interrupted, or stalled. Suffering, when considered as permission, engenders a deepening into life into our pains and our pleasures, our terrors and our delights. Numbing or nulling out our capacity to suffer being human looms as an equally large problem as does felt suffering. Do oscillations engender balance points between insensate mindlessness and exquisite mindfulness where the impacts of life can be felt, experienced, permitted, endured, and allowed?
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Enlightenment cuts through suffering, not by numbing it out or by transcendence. Rather, one strips away what might buffer or prevent suffering. Anna, for example, stays in bed. She attempts to avoid the fear and pain of being in the world. She succeeds but misses her passing life. Her depression functions to buffer what she might otherwise suffer. Anna lives at the perimeter of literal life and death and she misses the wide-awake dream called life. Analysis, for Anna, becomes a process of waking up to herself, her pains, and her joys. Through Zen practice and psychoanalysis, taken together or separately, we endeavor to tear away the psychic, emotional, perceptual cocoons that we unconsciously spin in our misguided efforts to buffer suffering, to keep us dreaming, to keep us sleeping. Zen and psychoanalysis both acknowledge that being wide-awake, fully permitting the experience of life and enduring its impact fully remains a constant struggle. The poet Lucien Stryk points to this struggle by observing that “. . . awakened life is not a birthright but something to be won through, along a way beyond the self ” (Stryk and Ikemoto 1995: xii). It would be a mistake to think otherwise. Each oscillation penetrates that much deeper and increases one’s capacity to endure and permit what needs suffering, and to see through the illusion and relinquish what need not be suffered. Scratching surfaces, digging deeper, hitting bedrock, one uncovers new surfaces to be worked. The plunge into any spiritual practice contains both soft and rough edges, moments of equipoise and of chaos. Seemingly solid bedrock can fragment into smithereens in the constant come-together break-apart life rhythms one inevitably encounters, whether suffered or not. Accounts of literal and psychological violence, chaos, horror, and terror, fill both the Zen and psychoanalytic literature. Maiming, dismemberment, and disfiguration appear as common Zen themes that express the intensity of desire for Truth. As Dennis Merzel (1994: 102) writes: Bodhidharma stared at a wall for nine years waiting for someone to come along who was determined enough to go all the way. Finally Eka showed the right resolution, but he had to stand in the snow for a whole night and cut off his arm before Bodhidharma would even talk to him. Obaku beat Rinzai three times heartily without blinking an eye; Master Bokushu broke Ummon’s leg; Tokusan gave thirty blows to anybody who dared to come close. The snow of Shorin is stained crimson, Let us dye our heart with it Humble though it may be. (Shibayama 1974: 287) With regard to such events, D. T. Suzuki (1961: 307) points out that:
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When the thing is at stake, the masters do not hesitate to sacrifice anything. In the case of Nansen, a kitten was done away with: Kyozan broke a mirror in pieces; a woman follower of Zen burned up a whole house; and another woman threw her baby into a river. The above account is not in accordance with historically traceable facts. Shibayama (1974/2000: 287) observes that: . . . the painful and desperate struggle in seeking after the Truth, even at the risk of one’s own life, is not a mythological fabrication by an old Zen Master. He who has experienced the same pain and hardship in really seeking the Truth cannot read just lightly as an old story. Zen practice as an expression of life contains both sharp and soft aspects arising and falling in moments, lifetimes, and eternities. Bion would say that effective practices, as this story demonstrates, create emotional turbulence and catastrophe (1965, 1970). However, catastrophe and turbulence hold a necessary place in psycho-spiritual growth. This theme asserts itself repeatedly and cogently in the Zen literature. Aitken, for example, notes that “. . . religious practice, no matter what the religion, is not necessarily joyous. People on the path commonly have a hard time with fear, terror, misery and pain. One goes through this” (1997: 20).
Poetic expression Poetic expression is a fundamental cornerstone of Zen religious praxes. Lucien Stryk notes that: “Appealing directly to one’s feeling and volition, as poetry in general does, Zen poetry is more likely than Zen prose to enable one to make the leap to the ultimate Truth . . .” (Stryk and Ikemoto 1973: xix). Zen poets frequently speak of ‘void-splitting,’ ‘earth smashing to smithereens,’ ‘thunder and lightening,’ ‘ocean beds aflame,’ and ‘swallowing molten iron balls, that cannot be spit out’ to describe the experience of Zen practice and awakening. Muso Kokushi, who Shoji Muramoto spoke so eloquently about in his presentation and now his chapter, expresses this kind of intensity: Vainly I dug for a perfect sky, Piling a barrier all around. Then one black night, lifting a heavy Tile, I crushed the skeletal void! (Muso 1275–1351 in Stryk and Ikemoto 1995: 24)
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Incredible shrinking man I am reminded of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), a grade B science fiction movie that I saw when I was a 10-year-old. I was astonished that he had shrunk so much that he paradoxically (simultaneously) became the vastness of the infinite universe. Incredibly, the shrinking man embodies intertwined shrinking/expanding aspects of one oscillation. Accepting beingas-it-is, he gives up the self and becomes Self. He relinquishes his resistance to shrinking, embraces the pull of the infinitesimal and merges into, and becomes the vast universe. Dynamic oscillation: shrinking, expanding in-between definite and infinite. Simultaneously expanded and contracted infinitesimally small and infinitely large – two edges of one nothingness. In the final stirring scene of this film, the protagonist makes peace with himself, his condition and the process he was accidentally subjected to as a result of radiation exposure. He says: So close the infinitesimal and the infinite. . . . The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet like the closing of a gigantic circle . . . And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought only in terms of man’s limited dimension. I had presumed that existence begins and ends. It’s man’s conception, not nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance . . . (Zugsmith and Arnold 1957) Lee is an artist. He’s good! He looks for encouragement, support, validation, and all of the New Age clichés. But encouragement feels like inordinate pressure. Anything less feels like a total and complete abandonment. Empathy, understanding, interpretation become intrusive attacks that leave him feeling both scooped out and swallowed up. However, he empties out and needs a constant reload. We oscillate back and forth attempting to locate the liminal space in-between too close and too distant; between emptied and reloaded. The in-between space where life sparks and death blows merge. We oscillate between connection and separation. For Lee, therapy becomes a dance of locating the simultaneity of connection/separation. Where intimacy does not require the loss of self and separation does not demand schizoid withdrawal. Lee describes expansion/shrinking oscillations. He at once becomes and is the incredible shrinking man. He experiences me similarly. He needs to keep me inflated and monitors me for signs of deflation all the while wondering if there is room for the both of us in the room as either or the both of us expand, or if I can hear his screams for help from the infinitesimal distance created as he shrinks. Without this balance, Lee suffers the anguish of failing to suffer his life. Anguish, that aspect of the wider universe of suffering, the extent of which
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depends in our investment in self, ignorance, and how active one might become about ‘not-knowing.’ How much energy can one invest in the endeavor to fail at suffering life that is then experienced as deadness? Lee reports oscillating in the consultation room between reclining on the couch and sitting on the ceiling. Vast emptiness/suffocation. A flag ripples in the breeze, the breeze ripples through a flag. The Zen Master observes, “not the flag nor the breeze. It is mind that moves.” Taking turns, Lee murders me, I murder Lee. We both become resurrected over and over seeking the balance point. Time passes; Zen and psychoanalysis converge, diverge, overlap, dovetail, dissolve, and intertwine. Continued practice engenders shifts in awareness and relatedness to self and other. Self might be taken more or less seriously, other more or less separately, depending on one’s shifting perceptual vantage point. Nowhere to hold on, falling into the abyss vast infinities – is this a plunge into death or an emerging into life?
Ambivalence: linearity/circularity Ambivalence contains both rough and soft edges from mild confusions to deep splits that cut through and divide the very core of being; and presents as a still-frame snapshot of imperceptibly slowed-down oscillations that, at the extreme, freeze and crack at fault-lines. Cracks can expand into gaps of abysmal forbidding depth within the psyche. Melanie Klein speaks graphically of splits between internal and external reality, creative and destructive forces, joy, horror, love, and hate that derail natural movements. In my practice, psychoanalysis and Zen both further, become part of, and express natural rhythms. The movements charted by Zen/psychoanalytic oscillations weave together linear and circular elements, as the expanding and contracting infinity of the moment becomes momentous. Without disregarding the reality of ambivalence, oscillations seem inevitable, normal, necessary aspects of being when not derailed. The natural circularity of life becomes revealed in oscillations. Many forms of circular movement exist. Spirals between definite and infinite express inner, outer, and in-between rhythms. Breathing, recurring thought patterns, transference generated repetition compulsions, seasons, tides. Endless rounds of chanting, bowing, and sitting meditation. Patient and therapist in recurring sessions, transference and countertransference dynamic dramas, emotional unfoldings, as they endure together the passing days, months and years. Seeker, patient and therapist alike begin again and again each term, year, week, day, moment
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in both real and phantasy time which crystallizes in both familiar and unfamiliar patterns and once again dissolves. Fertility, lunar, solar, seasonal, liturgical cycles continuously evolve. Young women with beating drums, rhythms pounding passionately, with abandon, refer to themselves collectively as ‘Seed.’ They sing songs to chronicle fertility, planting, sprouting, fullness, ripeness, harvest, around and around. In the fullness of raging passion, frenzy, they are alive, beautiful, beating drums and chanting lyrics until audience and performer distinctions dissolve and the room becomes caught in the rhythm of one undulating oscillation. Together, we feel the Earth moving. Be with me . . . if only for a moment; such shared ecstasy. Burst me into smithereens till dawn melts away the moon. Rhythms intensify. Rhythms prime the ecstasy pump of orgasm – sexual, physical, emotional, artistic, psychic, spiritual. Sufi whirling dervishes circle in and out of mystical union. Lovers circle in and out of climax . . . Molly Bloom screams ‘Yes!’ Psychotherapy can be understood as igniting, reigniting, or rerailing oscillation processes; reshaping deformed oscillations, and finding balance points between diffusion and contraction.
The Zendo One point along the oscillations of Zen practice which can up the intensity of involvement to larger than life proportions occurs during sesshin. This point, when magnified, reveals micro oscillations within a frame like the passing of day and night in the larger flow of changing seasons. The Zendo feels clean, sparse, but not lacking. Round black zafus line the hall in neat orderly rows. I enter and feel anxious. The structure evokes unpleasant memories. Perfectly lined-up zafus remind me of elementary school seats nailed to the classroom floor, in rows, rigid over-regimentation, corporal punishment, grim-faced nuns. The lack of spontaneity in the classroom engenders deadness. Sadism reigns in the form of excessive punishment, rationalized as sound discipline, engenders shame, and destroys emerging glimpses of self. Repressed memories return during extended periods of zazen. A monk circles the hall periodically offering to relieve tense backs and shoulders by striking the meditator with a hardwood stick. Initially, I wince and my body shakes to the cracking sound. The stick used to release tension, so reminiscent of the stick used to punish. Old coping mechanisms which helped me survive elementary school become activated. My mind shifts out of the present, to fantasies, and daydreams. Dissociated mind states follow.
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This gets worked out through practice and deeper familiarity with the process and the structure. My early experiences engendered anxiety. Early anxieties become unconsciously reified and create fixation points which become activated along with associated self states. I find myself feeling like the frightened child anticipating a thrashing with a stick. My body becomes tense, my posture rigid as I sense the monk slowly approaching. As he passes, I feel relief. Through deeper involvement these unconscious aspects are exposed. Blind reactions, once revealed, can be questioned. However, when not fully conscious of these processes, I become caught in a perceptual identity between the Zendo and the parochial grammar school. I am caught and despite years of analysis, initially, I don’t know it. With continued practice and deepening familiarity with both inner experience and external structure juxtaposed, the Zendo space and the discipline evolves into a holding environment which makes it possible for me to do everything I am there to do, as all incidentals and concerns are taken care of through the structure. I am a spiritual foetus (seed) incubating (germinating), held safely in the room (womb) of the Zendo. Can I ripen and bloom forth at my own pace in my own time? Does the retreat provide a viable option to the sufferingresistant cocoon wrapped tightly around my psychic skin? It eventually becomes clear to me there is nothing parochial about it.
Passion/rage The intensity of practice both demands and engenders passion. Passion is primary, emerging from the heart center, the rhythm of the heart, and the heartbeat of psychic life. Buddhist cosmology describes both god realm and hell realm passions in both states of ecstasy and of equipoise. However, for the most part, in my experience, Zen Buddhism does not deal fully with emotional life. The Buddhist belief is that overemphasis on emotional life will obscure realization of ultimate reality because transient emotions such as anger, love, hurt, and envy are aspects of the phenomenal world or relative reality. The problem, as I see it, lies in an unhealthy avoidance or wholesale denial of emotions and their significance for the individual’s internal world and in regard to one’s relationship to self, others, and to practice. This becomes one of degree. Neither overindulgence nor denial are tenable. Passion/rage permutations mark an experiential converging point between time spent on the zafu and time spent on the analytic couch. Through Zen, I become sensitized to both subtle and powerful energies. Buddhists often view rage as reflecting separation, or unfulfilled longing. Sometimes separations are what we seek, especially during the experience of self-fragmentation occurring when the oneness of mystical union is imminent. Dissolved subject and object distinctions close the you/me gap.
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What is the psychic distance between the promise of something happening, being given and taken away? The promise of satori, connectedness, with self, with other, with what is beyond self and other distinctions, teachers, Buddha, waiting, sitting, waiting. Zazen locates raw emotion, thought, and sensation. I feel rage bubbling over, watch the volcanic eruption, watch self, selves, others, form, melt, crystallize, shatter in permutations of liquid psychic lava, emotional upsurge, and outflow. Prolonged zazen builds the capacity for handling increasing intensities. Psychoanalysis gives meaning to bits and pieces of raw experience. Continued sitting in the wider oscillations of both processes brings into the present situation an awareness of inner obstructions and dissolves rage, which, if suffered, transforms into passion. Passion, longing for union with the divine, lover, universe, truth, life, death, moment, infinite moment, intimate contact with the depths of one’s own being, with what Zen describes as the face before I was born. Passion of forms and images swirling, spewing multicolored mind flowers, which blossom and melt away to the limits of what can be suffered and then back to breathing and sitting, the ringing bell, the wood block’s clap. Up and slow walking once again. I sit with rage and find myself opening into passion or perhaps passion opening into what I imagine is the me. Can rage intensify and burn through enough of me to reveal itself as passion? Can one grow through rage, past rage’s destructiveness until it burns itself into passion? From this zafu, if I embrace the horror and disturbance of felt rage, I can embrace the enlivening passion fires. I swallow fire and dream rainbows. Fire – pure energy transforms into a multifaceted gem, a spring cornucopia of blossoming psychic flowers. Rage, passion’s burning bush. The deadliness of rage can feed the aliveness of passion. Raging passions, passionate rages. Rage feels tense, tight, constricted in my body, nerves, muscles, bones, joints. The ache intensifies. Each heartbeat ripples through my body into the limbs, joints, to the ends of my fingers and toes. Thoughts become simultaneously effusive and restricted. Tight oscillations spinning out from hurt, indignation, disappointment, failed grasping, tighter and tighter circles of thought and feeling continue spinning around repetitive motifs. Tightening qualities of rage conceal openings to passion. Beyond the truth of dialectic tensions to pure energy evolutions, emerging from and permeating every cell and fiber of my being; the pure fluid energy with rage/passion aspects, rising in and out of form with varying proportions, degrees of intensity and color. Yet, when the tail of rage’s tiger is fully grasped, embraced, it becomes passion. Permutations of lived passion: for peace, creature-comforts, foods, Eros, connectedness, aliveness, flesh pleasures, music, passion for writing, painting, creating and destroying, orgasmic passions, kitchen sink passions, dish washing, garbage collecting and removing. All of it! Psychoanalytic and Zen passions; passions oscillating between work and play, love and hate mutually consumed and consuming. Play transforming to
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work, work becoming play. Love and hate passions become split asunder, dissolve, and merge. Death passions find an epitome of artistic and spiritual expression in the highly regarded death poems of the great Zen Masters. Here in the shadow of death it is hard To utter the final word. I’ll only say then, “Without saying,” Nothing more, Nothing more. (Dokyo Etan [1721], in Hoffmann 1986: 94) At the extreme, peace/turbulence evolve into life and death passions. The consequences can be far-reaching. The extensive violence in the world rationalized through political ideologies and/or religious belief systems contribute to human suffering, represent a contemporary manifestation with horrific global life and death implications. Rage expresses separation, subject and object disconnection, but also functions to maintain self/other distinctions. Dualistic thinking splits rage/ passion creating and perpetuating a seemingly unbridgeable gap between. Access to passion becomes lost. The multifaceted gem that life can be becomes flattened and one-dimensional. Oscillating through the amorphous, global, intuitive felt Zen experience to the specificity provided through the psychoanalytic encounter has me becoming the child who waits for his mother; the ideal mother who never comes, who promises to come, but fails. The mother who makes promises she wishes to but cannot keep. Failed promises and longings become bedrock and when shattered become pathways, they embody deeper unremembered longings, broken promises. Womb promises, shattered by too soon birth, induced labors, forced deliveries. What is Truth? Is it motherly love or reaction formation to hidden passion/rage that finds it impossible? Do oscillations circle between the fear of dropping and the wish to smash? The infant dropped too soon into labor bears the scar of the violence of forceps forced birth, an everpresent reminder to a pregnant mother who let her son be torn away too soon. Does the broken unspoken promise of reward, gratification, unavailable nourishment, become the palate from which present experience derives its color? Overlays of color obscure the moment’s truth despite the suddenly emerging force of past memories. When pulling on the rage thread, passion unravels. When following the passion thread, what will one find? Anger, fear, passion, from this couch Looking up;
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where a hungry dawn swallows raging stars from an ink sky.
Pregnant mother Does she know these flowers from her son this her special day – mind worn tired by age, this dirty trick of getting old. What is it like to be my pregnant mother, to be pregnant with me, her son? She knew – of course, a son – to be the son within her womb? Mother and son – one! What was it like to have the womb son ripped away too soon? Whose longings are these that I feel when plunging into abysmal emptiness and despair? Is it hers or mine? Both? The aged memory-shattered mother of my present speaks with poignant passion of her son. Calling: “I miss my son, my son, my love.” From this zafu, just past the open window, between bare branches the rising dawn sun shimmers on a wind-rippled lake.
References Aitken, R. (1997) The Practice of Perfection: The Paramitas from a Zen Buddhist Perspective, Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Bion, W. (1965) Transformations, London: Karnac Books. —— (1970) Attention and Interpretation, London: Karnac Books. Cooper, P. (2002) ‘Between wonder and doubt: Psychoanalysis in the goal-free zone,’ American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 62(2), 95–118. —— (2004) ‘Oscillations: Zen and psychoanalytic versions,’ Journal of Religion and Health, 43(3), 233–243. Hoffmann, Y. (1986) Japanese Death Poems, Rutland, VT: Tuttle. Joyce, V. (2002) ‘Faith links,’ pp. 103–132 in M. Bakur Weiner, P. Cooper, and C. Barbre (eds) Psychotherapy and Religion: Many Paths, One Journey, Montvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Merzel, D. (1994) Beyond Sanity and Madness: The Way of Zen Master Do ¯ gen, Rutland, VT: Tuttle. Shibayama, Z. (1974/2000) The Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Boston, MA: Shambhala. Originally published as Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, New York: HarperCollins (1974).
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Stryk, L. and Ikemoto, T. (1973) Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill, New York: Grove Press. —— (1995) Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, New York: Grove Press. Suzuki, D. T. (1961) Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series, New York: Grove Press. Zugsmith, A. (Producer) and Arnold, J. (Director) (1957) The Incredible Shrinking Man, United States: Universal Studios.
Index
Abe, Masao 80, 81, 94 Abhidhamma 124 absorption: into an infinite essence 39; no-self aspects during states of 60–2; by the unconscious 45 acceptance 93; self-acceptance 98 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) 136, 137, 139 Adam Kadmon (Primordial Man) 168 affectively driven images 96–7 agency 29–30, 34, 98, 124 Aitken, Robert 220, 222 Akizuki Ryumin 157 alaya-vijana (storehouse consciousness) 157, 162–3 Alexander, Franz 3 alienation 17 allocentric awareness 62–5 allophilia 64 amae (Japanese form of interpersonal dependence) 38; Zen and “Amaeru” 38–43 ambivalence 224–5 analytic relationship 66–75, 79, 89–90, 94, 171; letting the patient emerge as his/herself in 202 analytic space/environment: compassion as a safe space 121, 129; encountering the void in the safety of 88; keeping the space 126; mutual discovery within safety of 92–3; temenos, the container 68–9 analytical psychology 121, 130; individuation 144–5 see also individuation; Jungian psychology and Buddhism 189–90, 191; object constancy 123–4; transformative surrender 143–51
Anatman see no-self/true self of Buddhism Anatta (absence of essence) 98 Anbeck, Christa and De Groot, Peter 138–9 Angulimala 126–7, 128, 129 anjin (true peace of mind) 18 anxiety 100–1 archetype 96–7; archetypal Sefirot 168; Archetypal Spell of Self 208, 210–11; Self archetype 73, 97, 145 Aristophanes 36 Asher, C. 144 Ashikaga Tadayoshi 176, 184 Ashikaga Takauji 176, 182 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 176 Assagioli, Roberto 155 assimilation of the not-self 155–6 Atman 4, 158–9, 162; Buddhist distinctions 14 attachment: identification and 15, 16–17; non-attachment 51 see also detachment; psychological interpretation of 15–16; Zen view of 51 attention: bare see mindfulness/mindful awareness; Freud 135 Austin, James H. 80, 134 autonomy 29, 31, 35; autonomous existence of thoughts 9–10; overridden by feeling spellbound 207 Avidya (ignorance) 209 awakened life 221; see also enlightenment awareness: allocentric 62–5; choiceless 136–7 see also mindfulness/mindful awareness; formless 104; mindful see mindfulness/mindful awareness; nature of 104; self-awareness 89, 97, 209
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Ba’al Shem Tov (Yisroel ben Eliezer) 167, 168 bare attention see mindfulness/mindful awareness Basho (Matsuo Munefusa) 116 Batchelor, Stephen 148 Beck, Charlotte Joko 34–5 Becker, Ernest 12 being known 71 Benedict, Ruth 38 Berlin, Isaiah 33–4 Between, the (‘das Zwischen’, Buber) 165, 166–7, 169–70, 171–2, 173 bewitchment 211, 212; feeling spellbound 207; see also spell psychology Bion, Wilfred 81–4, 88, 135, 219–20 body scans 136 boga (the ‘self forgotten’) 39 boundary–penetration polarity 109–11 Brahman 159, 162 brain research 60, 64–5 Brentano, Franz 45, 49 Buber, Martin 165–7, 168–70, 173 Buddha 110, 111, 156, 162; Angulimala and 127, 129, 130; Dependent Origination formulation 115; Four Noble Truths and no-self 21; Zen’s account of Buddha’s enlightenment 156 Buddha Mind 179 Buddha nature: becoming a Buddha immediately 191; transmission 140–1 Buddhist concept of no-self see no-self/true self of Buddhism Buddhist psychology and thought: approach to anxiety 101; approach to suffering 30–1, 101, 110–11; Buddhism and developmental psychology 12–13; compassion 30 see also compassion; esoteric see Shingon; Tibetan Buddhism; interdependency 30 see also interdependency; in Muso¯ Soseki 175–6, 179–85; relaxation of struggle 102–5; of self 11–12, 14–15 see also no-self/true self of Buddhism; therapeutic applications 207, 208–10; see also Four Noble Truths Bugantal, James 136 catharsis 112–13 Changsha Jingcen 158, 163
Chikaku see Muso¯ Soseki choiceless awareness 136–7; see also mindfulness/mindful awareness Christian mysticism: experience of the Godhead and formless self 160–1; nothingness in 149; therapeutic aspect of 42–3; Zen-reminiscent ways of speaking of God 41–2 Chuang-tzu 110 circularity 224–5 CMT (Compassionate Mind Training) 136, 137–8 Coetzee, J. M.: Slow Man 27–31, 34, 35, 36 collective self 53 Coltart, Nina 134–5, 139 compassion 29, 30, 31, 34, 35–6, 105; as a safe space 121, 129 Compassionate Mind Training (CMT) 136, 137–8 complexes 96, 97 Confucianism 190 consciousness: allocentric awareness 62–5; ‘I’ consciousness 11 see also ‘I’; self-awareness; kept alive to present reality 132–3 see also mindfulness/ mindful awareness; and mystical experience 128–9; as one of the skandas 10, 12; pure consciousness of dependence 40–1; self as subjective consciousness 12; self-consciousness 96, 97 see also self-awareness; self, in Buddhism, as knowable to the conscious mind 15; spectrum of 155–6; storehouse (alaya-vijana) 157, 162–3; subject–object functioning 45; transcendent 45–6 see also enlightenment; unity consciousness 155–6; see also mind container, in therapeutic and spiritual work 68–9; see also analytic space/environment Conze, Edward 47 Cooper, Paul C. 20 Crook, J. 141 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 96 datsuga (self dropped off) 39 Dazhu Huihai 41 DBT (Dialectic Behaviour Therapy) 136, 137, 138, 140
Index death: attachment and identification as ways of escaping fear of 16; endeavour to escape 12; passions 228 deconditioning 59, 61 defilements (klesha) 16 Dehing, J. 114 dependency 38–43; (inter)dependent origination 110, 116–17; interdependency see interdependency; pure consciousness of dependence 40–1 Descartes, René 10 desire 16; need to be desired 36; psychoanalytic view 36–7; and the self 27–37; suffering and 30 despair 27, 29, 31, 171, 193, 229 detachment 33, 35, 51, 169 developmental psychology: Buddhism and 12–13, 15–17; meaning of ‘ego’ (Piaget) 123 Developmental Spell of Self 208, 211–14 Dhammapada 14 Dharma Body 196 dharma-dhatu meditation 193 Dharmakaya 74; experiencing 103 Dialectic Behaviour Therapy (DBT) 136, 137, 138, 140 dialogue philosophy (Buber) 165–73 dis-identification 11, 16, 17, 155 discrimination 34, 37; meaning and acts of 122 dissociation 22, 97, 104, 212, 213, 225; emergence of dissociated material 86 Do¯ gen Zen-ji (Eihei Do¯ gen) 4, 10–11, 20, 22, 40, 158, 178 Doi, Takeo 38 Dokyo Etan (Shoju Rojin) 228 dream analysis 72–3; and the making of meaning 125–6, 127–8 Dumolin, Heinrich 183 Dynamic Sunyata 81, 83 Eckhart, Meister 149, 158, 160 ego: assimilation by 155; complex 97; death of 51–2; and Eastern non-ego 194, 195 see also no-self/true self of Buddhism; egoic dualism 209–10; egoic process 101, 104; fostering of a strong ego 8; giving up ego’s false belief in its centrality 145 see also transformative surrender; ‘I’ and 8–9; illusion of 8, 51; no-self and 8, 49–50,
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51; object constancy and 123–4; pathology of 51; pivotal role in the mind 50–1; in the psychology of Zen 45–54; struggle and 103; thoughts as 9–10 egocentricity 59, 61–2, 64 Eigen, M. 81–2, 83, 88 Eightfold Path 12, 31 Einstein, Albert 206 emotion: complexes and 97; ego’s evaluation of 50; no-self states and 96; passion see passion; Zen and 226–9 emptiness (sunyata): and Bion’s notion of ‘O’ 81–90; compassion as a safe empty space 121, 129; definition of sunyata 80–1; dwelling in the place of 79–90; empty self-awareness 209 see also self-awareness; encounter with 84–5; form as 47–8, 118, 209; as life 48; and loss of oneself in the totality 39 see also no-self/true self of Buddhism; mirror of emptiness 209; non-existence and emptiness of emptiness 94–5; psychoanalytic clinical examples 85–9; as source of all existence 10; surrender, nothingness and 148–51; Taoist emptiness/non-existence 148 energy manifestation 74 enlightenment: of the Buddha 156; compassion and 35, 36; immediate 191; mindfulness and 133–4; Muso¯ Soseki’s quest for 180–1; post-enlightenment living 48–9, 117, 181–5; suffering cut through by 221; in Zen 39, 134, 156–60 see also kensho-satori; satori Epstein, M. 116, 149, 150 fairy tales: healing properties of 198–205; therapeutic applications of insights from 206–8, 210–14 Fisher, S. C. 147 flow experience 96 form, as emptiness 47–8, 118, 209 formless self: Christian mystical experience of the Godhead and 160–1; and ‘no-self ’ 161–3 see also no-self/true self of Buddhism; Zen experience of 156–60 Four Noble Truths 12, 21, 30–1, 134, 220 Franklin, Benjamin 207 Freke, T. 149
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Index
Freud, Sigmund 8, 21, 22, 135 Fromm, Erich 14, 17–18, 134 Fukushima Roshi, Keido 47, 48, 50, 52 God 41–2; no-self and the emptying God 79–90; relationship with the transcendent 145–6; surrender to God/self 144–5 see also transformative surrender Godaigo, Emperor 181–2 Godhead 160–1 Goethe, Johann W. von 150 Goleman, Daniel 132 Gordon, Rosemary 128 Gotama see Buddha Gozan Bungaku 181 Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom 162 Guggenbuhl-Craig, A. 145 Gunn, Robert 80, 86 Guru Yoga 73 Haari of Tzfat 167–8 Hakuin Ekaku 42 Hanh, Thich Nhat 132 Harada Roshi, Sekkei 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54 Hart, David L. 206, 210, 211, 213 Hasidism 167–8 healing: awakening of healing capacity 204; fairy tales’ properties of 198–205; psychological healing in Zen 42–3, 53–4; of the self in psychotherapy 20–1, 132–41, 213; symbols 114; technology 132–41 Heart Sutra 47, 183, 209 Heidegger, M. 81 hero’s journey 200–5 Hidas, A. M. 146 Hisamatsu, Shin’ichi 3, 4 Hokkai-join (hand sign) 193, 196 Holmes, Ken 109 Horney, Karen 13, 135 ‘I’: as Atman 158–9 see also Atman; ‘ego’ and 8–9 see also ego; as the formless self 158–9 see also formless self; I–Me–Mine triad 59–64; as ‘idea’ 9–10; self as ‘I’ identity 12 I-shang I-ning 180 I-Thou relationship (Buber) 165–7, 173; see also Inclusion (Buber)
idealism 159 identification: attachment and 15, 16; liberation from 16–17 Iemitsu Tokugawa 189 ignorance (Avidya) 209 Inclusion (Buber) 169–70, 171–2 individualism 53 individuation 13, 14, 144–5, 147, 150–1, 210–11 insight-wisdom of kensho-satori 61–5; see also kensho-satori interdependency 30, 37, 98, 99, 115; amae (Japanese form of interpersonal dependence) 38; (inter)dependent origination 110, 116–17; in dynamics of opposites in pain 110; Zen and “Amaeru” 38–43 intimacy 212 intuition 61, 135, 149 involution 155, 156 invulnerability 212 issai genjo experience 157, 161 Jaeger, Willigis 161 James, William 9–10, 11, 128–9 Jay, N. B. 146 Jesus Christ (Gospel of Thomas) 161 John of the Cross 160–1 Johnston, William 38–43 Joseph, S. M. 112 Joshu 118 Joyce, Vivienne 220 Jung, Carl 3, 4, 13, 22, 45, 123; Eastern non-ego 194, 195; emptiness 150; individuation 144, 147, 150, 210–11; and Jacobi, J. 210; mandalas 189, 190; meditation 194–5; polarity processing 109, 110–12, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118; psychic primacy of affectively driven images 96; the Transcendent Function 112, 128 see also Transcendent Function Jungian psychology 189–90, 191, 210; see also analytical psychology; Jung, Carl Kabala 167–8 Kakukai 181 kensho-satori: experience of ‘formless self ’ 157–8; no-self aspects in 61–5 Klein, Melanie 224 klesha (defilements) 16
Index koan practice 104, 175; ‘working with natural koans’ (Magid) 114 Ko¯ ho¯ Kenjitsu 180, 181 Kohut, H.: Tragic Man 33 Komei, Emperor 184 Kukai 190–1 Kyoto 2006 Conference on Self and No-Self 4–6 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 97 Lan-his Tao-lung 178 Lao-tzu 110, 148 Liang Zuo-zhu 183–4 Lichtenberg, J. D., motivational systems 33 life, as emptiness 48 linearity 224–5 Linji Yixuan 15, 40 Longchempa 73 love 27–30, 32–3, 34; breaking the spell 212, 213–14; romantic 34; selfless 160; see also passion Luria, Isaac 167–8 Ma-tsu Tao-I 181, 183 Machiavelli, N. 33 Madhyamika School 95 Magid, B. 115, 117 Mahavairocana-tatha-gata 190, 193, 196; emerging image of 192–6 mandalas 189, 190, 191, 196 Marcel, Gabriel 212 marijuana 130 Martino, Richard De 208 Maslow, Abraham H. 159 materialism 159 MB-EAT (Mindfulness Based Eating Awareness Training) 136, 137 MBCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) 135–7 MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) 136–7, 140 meaning, the making of 121–31; object constancy and 123–4; playing with meaning 127–8; Transcendent Function and 128–30 meditation: dharma-dhatu 193; focusing on no-self 98; healing technology 136–7; Jung and 194–5; liberation from identification through 16–17, 18; nava-asubha-bhavanah 177–8; no-self aspects during states of absorption
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and kensho 59–65; sesshin 225–6; vipassana 16, 67, 134 see also mindfulness/mindful awareness; as way to salvation 18, 195; wholeness through 36; zazen see zazen mental states see mind Merton, Thomas 22, 32–3, 35, 36 Merzel, Dennis 221 Miller, J. C. 117 Miller, Melvin E. 135 Milton, John 82 Minamoto no Yoritomo 177 mind: Buddha Mind 179; evolution stages of 155–6; fundamental experience of ‘Mind/universe’ 156–60; mental state of oneness 49; no-mind (mushin) 39; pivotal role of the ego 50–1; source mind of Zen 157; subject–object functioning 45; Wilber’s ‘fundamental self ’ as ‘Mind/universe’ 155–6; see also consciousness Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) 135–7 Mindfulness Based Eating Awareness Training (MB-EAT) 136, 137 Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) 136–7, 140 mindfulness/mindful awareness 63, 93, 98; engaging polarities through 111–18; enlightenment and 133–4; experiencing the symptom mindfully 112–13; meanings and uses 132–4; as psychotherapy 134–41; and the teacher 140–1; and the technology of healing 132–41; traditional practices 139–41; training/practices in 96, 98, 104, 114, 139–41 see also vipassana mirror of emptiness 209 Mirror Wisdom 162 Mitchell, Stephen 29–30, 33 MLAIs (Multi-Letter Acronym Interventions) 138–9 Moacinin, Radmila 191 Modell, Arnold 97 Morgan, W. and Morgan, S. 133 mu (nothingness) 39; self of 47–8 see also no-self/true self of Buddhism muga (no-self) 39, 161–2; see also no-self/ true self of Buddhism Muin Empan 179
236
Index
Multi-Letter Acronym Interventions (MLAIs) 138–9 Munindra 111 mushin (no-mind) 39 Muso¯ Soseki (Kokushi) 175–85, 222 Myo¯ e 179 mysticism: Christian see Christian mysticism; fundamental experience of ‘Mind/universe’ 156–60; loss of oneself in the totality 39; mystical union 41; nothingness in 149; Zen see Zen Nachman of Brazlav, Rabbi 172 Nagarjuna 80, 95, 110 Nakajima Roshi, Gikan 48, 49, 50 Nakamura Hajime 40 Nakane, Chie 38 Nan-yang Hui-chung 182–3 Nansen (Chinese Zen Master) 50 nava-asubha-bhavanah meditation 177–8 neuroimaging 64–5 neurosis: egoic dualism as source of neurotic suffering 209; mechanism 207 Nirmanakaya experiencing 102 Nishitani Keiji 138 no-blame 93 no-self/true self of Buddhism: Anatta (absence of essence) 98; and Buddhist distinctions concerning Atman 14; Buddhist psychology of self 11–12, 14–15; the ego and 8, 49–50, 51; Hisamatsu 4; impossibility of conceptualization of 94–5; initiating the transcendent 194–6; interworking and interweaving of self/no-self 21–4; Jungian Self and 110–11, 117; knowability of 15; the living of no-self 48–9, 117, 181–5; loss of oneself in the totality 39; the ‘no’ of no-self 47–8; no-self and the emptying God 79–90; no-self orientation in analytic therapy 92–9; polarity processing and the self/no-self 110–11, 116; psychology and the terminology of 19–21; and the psychology of the collective self 53; and the Root Spell of Self-Perception 209–10; during states of absorption and kensho 59–65; taking the backward step and following the self 20; Tibetan Buddhist understanding 74; as transcendent consciousness
45–6; as the void of the opposites 110–11; zazen and no-self 10–11; in Zen tradition see Zen non-attachment 51; see also detachment nothingness see emptiness (sunyata); mu ‘O’, Bion’s notion of 81–90 object constancy 123–4 object relations theory 92 oneness 49, 50, 63, 110, 157, 205, 226 Open State Psychotherapy 208, 209, 210 openness: relaxed state of 207; therapist’s role as model of 213 opposites 109–11; uniting/transcending of 111–18 Original Face 157, 209; see also formless self oscillations, of Zen practice and psychoanalysis 217–29 ‘otherness’ experience of 73–5 pain 20, 28–9, 37; compassion and 49 see also compassion; immersing into the pain 113–14; paradoxes and polarities of suffering and 109–11; see also suffering paradox 109–11 parallel self/other universes 63, 64(Fig.) passion 27, 29, 31, 32, 36; Buddhist attitude to 16; death passions 228; rage and 226–9; transmutation of 29, 112 pattern recognition and release 207–8, 210 Payne, Richard K. 80–1, 94–5 peace of mind (anjin) 18 perception, ego’s role in 50–1 personality 97–8; manifestation 74 personhood, undermined by no-self states 96 Piaget, Jean 123 Plato 36 poetry, Zen 222 polarity processing 109–18; paradoxes and polarities of pain and suffering 109–11; therapeutic approaches 111–17 pregnant mother meditation 229 projection 21, 66, 73–4; complexes and 97; recognition and 74; see also transference psychoanalytic relationship 66–75, 79, 89–90, 94, 171
Index psychological complexes 96, 97 psychology: cross-cultural 52–3; Western see self in Western psychology; Western psychology psychotherapy/psychoanalysis: anxiety reduction 100; clinical encounters with emptiness 85–9; creative integration of zazen and 22–3; desire 36–7; dialogue with Buddhism over recent decades 3–4; emerging image of Mahavairocana-tatha-gata in therapy 192–6; incomplete understanding of 34; mindfulness as psychotherapy 134–41; no-self orientation 92–9; Open State Psychotherapy 208, 209, 210; and the oscillations of Zen practice 217–29; ‘salvation’ and 17–18, 43; self in see self in psychotherapy; self orientation 92; struggle 102–5; therapeutic applications of spell psychology 206–14; therapeutic approaches to polarity processing 111–17; see also analytical psychology Pure Land 183, 191, 195 rage 226–9 Ramana Maharshi 10, 158–9 relational model of mental health 29–30, 33 relationships: I-Thou relationship (Buber) 165–7, 173; of Inclusion 169–70, 171–2; object constancy and affective relating 124; with the spiritual teacher 66–75, 89–90; therapeutic 66–75, 79, 89–90, 94, 171; with the transcendent 145–6 responsibility 97 rhythms, natural 224–5 Rinzai (Zen Master) 209 Roberts, Bernadette 85 romantic love 34 Root Spell of Self-Perception 208–10 Safran, Jeremy 134 salvation: meditation as way to 18, 195; religious symbols and 190; ‘therapy’ and 17–18, 43; True Pure Land Sect 189 Sambhogakaya experiencing 103 sangha 23–4
237
satori 40, 157; loss of oneself in the totality 39; no-self aspects in kenshosatori 61–5; see also kensho-satori Schleiermacher, Friedrich 40 Sefirot 168 Sekito¯ 179 self-acceptance 98 Self archetype 73, 97, 145; Archetypal Spell of Self 208, 210–11 self-awareness 89, 97, 209 self-consciousness 96, 97 self in Buddhism see no-self/true self of Buddhism self in mystical traditions: Buddhist ‘no-self ’ see no-self/true self of Buddhism; Zen; experience of the Godhead and the formless self in Christian mysticism 160–1; the formless self and ‘no-self ’ 161–3; loss of oneself in the totality 39; Wilber’s ‘fundamental self ’ as ‘Mind/universe’ 155–6; Zen experience of ‘formless self ’ 156–60 see also Zen self in psychotherapy 95–8; alienation from self 17–18; anxiety and 100; Archetypal Spell of Self 208, 210–11; Developmental Spell of Self 211–14; ‘ego’ and ‘I’ 8–9 see also ego; ‘I’; goal as self-improvement 103, 104; healing of the self 20–1; interworking and interweaving of self/no-self 21–4; Jungian Self 73, 110–11, 117, 150; person and self 98; Root Spell of Self-Perception 208–10; Self archetype see Self archetype; self as ‘I’ identity (Becker) 12; self/no self in therapeutic dialogue (Buber’s dialogue philosophy) 165–73; self orientation 92; vulnerability of the self 212–13; Wilber’s ‘fundamental self ’ as ‘Mind/universe’ 155–6 self in Western psychology 13; ‘I’ as ‘idea’ 9–10; I–Me–Mine triad 59–62; self as ‘I’ identity (Becker) 12; somatic self 60; Wilber’s ‘fundamental self ’ as ‘Mind/universe’ 155–6 self-knowledge 97–8; see also self-awareness self-loss 39 self psychology 30, 33 self-realization 13, 14, 21; individuation see individuation; in Zen 47
238
Index
self-recognition 97 self-reflection 97 self-sacrifice, as transformative surrender 143–51 self-transcendence 13 sesshin (Zen meditation period) 225–6 shadow 97, 155 Shakespeare, William 210 Shakyamuni Buddha see Buddha Shaw, George Bernard 34 Shibayama, Z. 222 Shinchi Kakushin 179 Shingon (Japanese esoteric Buddhism) 190–1, 195–6 shinku myou experience 157, 161 Shinran 179 Shu-shan Guang-ren 178–9 Shuho Myocho 181 Shun’oku Myoha 176 skandas doctrine 10, 11–12, 209 skillful means (upaya) 24, 42 somatic self 60 space: therapeutic see analytic space/ environment; of the Zendo 225–6 spell psychology 206–14 Spiegelman, J. M. and Miyuki, M. 115 spiritual teacher/student relationship 66–75, 89–90 splitting 22, 102 Starr, Mirabai 85 storehouse consciousness (alaya-vijana) 157, 162–3 struggle 101–5 Stryk, Lucien 221, 222; and Ikemoto, Takashi 222 ‘suchness’ 62, 116, 118, 132 suffering: through alienation from self 17–18; Buddhist approach to 30–1, 101, 110–11; Buddhist Truth of Suffering 12, 30–1, 220 see also Four Noble Truths; compassion and 105 see also compassion; desire and 30; of despair 29, 31; egoic dualism as source of neurotic suffering 209; meaning born from 122–30; paradoxes and polarities of pain and 109–11; resolution in J. M. Coetzee novel Slow Man 27–30, 31; shared goal of psychotherapy and Buddhism as alleviation of 19–21; Zen, psychoanalysis and 219–22; see also pain
Suler, John 74 Summers, Frank 92 sunyata see emptiness surrender: to the Buddha 40; emptiness, nothingness and 148–51; as letting go 89; to ‘O’ 90; within the psychological experience 145–7; transformative, in analytic psychology 143–51 Suzuki, D. T. 3, 14, 15, 149, 157, 158, 207, 221–2 symbols: mandalas 189, 190, 191, 196; unifying and healing 114 Tamlane, Scottish tale of 213 Tanaka Roshi, Kanju 50, 52 Tantric practice 73 Taoist emptiness/non-existence 148 Tauler, Johann 149 temenos (the container) 68–9; see also analytic space/environment Tenryu¯-ji temple 184 Thera, Nyanoponika 132, 133 therapeutic environment see analytic space/environment therapeutic relationship 66–75, 79, 89–90, 94, 171 Thompson, M. G. 3 thoughts, as ego (‘I’ as ‘idea’) 9–10 Thurman, R. 80, 83 Tibetan Buddhism 74, 190; ‘mere self ’ 50 Tikkun (restoration) 168 Toshihiko, Izutsu 41 transcendence: of ego consciousness 45–6 see also enlightenment; no-self initiating the transcendent 194–6; of opposites 111–18; recognition of a transcendent force in Zen 40; relationship with the transcendent 145–6; self-transcendence 13 see also self-realization; the transcendent God of Christian mysticism 41–2 Transcendent Function 112, 114–17, 121, 128–9 transference 21, 22, 69–70, 71, 73–4 transformative surrender 143–51 transmission of ‘Buddha nature’ 140–1 Transpersonal Psychology 155–6, 159–60, 161–3 True Pure Land Sect 189, 195 truth assumptions (Berlin) 33–4
Index Twelve-Linked Chain of Dependent Arising 15–16 unity consciousness 155–6 universe as Mind 155–60 unknowing 42, 148–9, 150 upaya (skillful means) 24, 42 Vajradhare Buddha 118 values: assumptions (Berlin) 33–4; integration of 36; meaning and acts of evaluation 122 Van Bragt, J. 81 Vasubandhu 45 vipassana 16, 67, 134; see also mindfulness/mindful awareness ‘Virgin Queen, The’ (fairy tale) 198–205 virtues 33–4, 36 void, the 79, 84, 87–9, 110–11, 118; see also emptiness (sunyata); no-self/true self of Buddhism Western psychology: gaps between Japanese Zen Buddhism and 46–7; Jungian see analytical psychology; Jungian psychology; self in see self in Western psychology; spell psychology 206–14 Wilber, Ken 16, 155–6, 158, 159 will 207 wisdom: Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom 162; insight-wisdom of kensho-satori 61–5; manifestation 74–5; sunyata and 149; the void as 111 witnessing 62, 117 Wittine, Bryan 136 Wu-hsueh Tsu-yuan 178 Xiao-xiu 185 Xiong Xiu-cai 184 Yamada Mumon 156–7 Yamasaki, T. 196
239
Yanagida, Seizan 179, 180–1, 182 Yasunaga Roshi, Sodo 50, 51 Yogacara school 157, 162 Yoritomi, Motohiro 191, 195 Young-Eisendrath, P. 115, 124; and Muramoto, S. 4 Yuasa, Yasuo 189 zazen: liberation from identification through 16–17; management of anxiety states and panic through 22–3; no-self and 10–11; passion and rage in 226–9 Zen: aim of 14–15; Christian mysticism and 41–2; dependency and 38–43; development of Zen culture out of conflicts 175–85; the ego in the psychology of 45–54; empty rowboat parable of no-blame 93; enlightenment 39, 134, 156–60 see also kensho-satori; satori; experience of ‘formless self ’ 156–60; first steps 217–19; gaps between Japanese Zen Buddhism and Western psychology 46–7; gradualist approach to enlightenment 134; interworking and interweaving of self/no-self 22–4; koan practice 104; no-self aspects during states of absorption and kensho 59–65; no-self experience reports of Zen Masters 47–54; old woman koan 93–4; poetry 222; psychoanalysis and the oscillations of Zen practice 217–29; psychological approach to 38–43; psychological awareness and 22–4; psychological healing in 42–3, 53–4; satori see satori; sesshin 225–6; struggle and koan practice 104; therapeutic aspects of 42–3, 53–4; zazen see zazen Zendo (Zen meditation hall) 225–6 Zugsmith, A. and Arnold, J.: The Incredible Shrinking Man 223
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