AS DIFFICULT as it was to find common ground between the two Buddhist masters, it is far more daunting to seek congruence between the psychological traditions of East and West. For me, though, the Buddhist picture of the Wheel of Life (Wheel of Samsara), one of the most ubiquitous images of the Buddhist world, has always seemed a particularly useful starting place in comparing Buddhist and Western notions of suffering and psychological health. The Wheel of Life depicts what are known as the Six Realms of Existence, through which sentient beings are said to cycle endlessly in their round of rebirths. In artwork, this circular I form, or mandala, is set into the yawning jaws of Yama, the lord of death. The mandala vividly illustrates all six of the realms to which beings are subject: the Human Realm, the Animal Realm, the Hell Realm, the Realm of the Pretas (Hungry Ghosts), the Realm of the Asuras (Jealous Gods or Titans), and the God Realm. These are the major subdivisions, and texts on the subject describe hundreds of realms within each. Leading off of the wheel, emerging out of the Human Realm, is a path to Buddhahood, signifying the special opportunity implicit in the human birth: the realization of Buddha-mind, an awakening that leads to escape from the Wheel of Life.
The Wheel of Life is used in Buddhist countries to teach about the concept of karma (merit), the notion that a person’s actions in this life will affect the kind of rebirth he or she will take in the next. Harming others contributes to rebirth in Hell Realms; indulging the passions, to rebirth in Animal Realms; giving to others (and especially to monks or monasteries), to more comfortable human births or rebirths in God Realms, and so on. The actual psychological teachings about karma are much more sophisticated than this, of course, but the mandala is the kind of image that children or beginners can grasp easily. The essential point is that as long as beings are driven by greed, hatred, and delusion—forces represented in the center of the circle by a pig, a snake, and a rooster attempting to devour one another—they will remain ignorant of their own Buddha-nature; ignorant of the transitory, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory nature of the world; and bound to the Wheel of Life.
Yet, one of the most compelling things about the Buddhist view of suffering is the notion, inherent in the Wheel of Life image, that the causes of suffering are also the means of release; that is, the sufferer’s perspective determines whether a given realm is a vehicle for awakening or for bondage. Conditioned by the forces of attachment, aversion, and delusion, our faulty perceptions of the realms—not the realms themselves—cause suffering. Inset into each realm is a tiny Buddha figure (actually, a representation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, an enlightened being whose energy is devoted to the eradication of suffering in others), who symbolically teaches us how to correct the misperceptions that distort each dimension and perpetuate suffering. We do not experience any of the realms with clarity, teach the Buddhists; instead, we cycle through all of them fearfully, cut off from a full experience, unable to fully embrace them and afraid of what we will see. Just as the thoughts in our minds keep endlessly chattering as if beyond our control, so we slip from realm to realm without really knowing where we are. We are locked into our minds, but we do not really know them. We are adrift and struggling, buffeted by the waves of our minds, having not learned how to float.
This is the other way to understand the Wheel of Life, to take it less literally and more psychologically. The core question of Buddhist practice, after all, is the psychological one of “Who am I?” Investigating this question requires exploration of the entire wheel. Each realm becomes not so much a specific place but rather a metaphor for a different psychological state, with the entire wheel becoming a representation of neurotic suffering.
According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering. This has always seemed very much in keeping with Freud’s views. As Freud put it, the patient
must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way is thus paved for the reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms, while at the same time place is found for a certain tolerance for the state of being ill.1
This belief that reconciliation can lead to release is fundamental to the Buddhist notion of the six realms. We cannot find our enlightened minds while continuing to be estranged from our neurotic ones. As Freud so presciently remarked, “When all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.”2 In each realm of our experience, teach the Buddhists, we must learn how to see clearly. Only then can the suffering that the Buddha identified as universal be transformed. Release from the Wheel of Life, from the Six Realms of Existence, is traditionally described as nirvana and is symbolized by the path leading off of the Human Realm. Yet it has become a fundamental axiom of Buddhist thought that nirvana is samsara—that there is no separate Buddha realm apart from worldly existence, that release from suffering is won through a change in perception, not through a migration to some kind of heavenly abode.
Western psychology has done much to illuminate the six realms. Freud and his followers insisted on exposing the animal nature of the passions; the Hell-ish nature of paranoid, aggressive, and anxiety states; and the insatiable longing of what came to be called oral craving (which is depicted in pictures of the Hungry Ghosts). Later developments in psychotherapy brought even the upper realms into focus. Humanistic psychotherapy emphasized the “peak experiences” of the God Realms; ego psychology, behaviorism, and cognitive therapy cultivated the competitive and efficient ego seen in the Realm of the Jealous Gods; and the psychology of narcissism was specifically about the questions of identity so essential to the Human Realm. Each of these trends in psychotherapy was concerned with returning a missing piece of the human experience, restoring a bit of the neurotic mind from which we had become estranged.
This concern with repossessing or reclaiming all aspects of the self is fundamental to the Buddhist notion of the six realms. We are estranged not just from these aspects of our character, the Buddhist teachings assert, but also from our own Buddha-nature, from our own enlightened minds. We have ample opportunity to practice the methods of repossessing or remembering that are specifically taught in meditation, for we can practice on all of the material of the six realms, on all of the sticking points in our minds.
If aspects of the person remain undigested—cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated—they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred, and delusion attach themselves. They are black holes that absorb fear and create the defensive posture of the isolated self, unable to make satisfying contact with others or with the world. As Wilhelm Reich demonstrated in his groundbreaking work on the formation of character, the personality is built on these points of self-strangement; the paradox is that what we take to be so real, our selves, is constructed out of a reaction against just what we do not wish to acknowledge. We tense up around that which we are denying, and we experience ourselves through our tensions. One recent patient of mine, for example, realized that he had developed an identity centered on feelings of shame, unworthiness, and anger rooted in a momentary experience of his mother’s emotional unavailability when he was a young child. Sensing her absence, he had become afraid, but this fear was too threatening to his psyche so he instead converted it into feelings of inadequacy, making himself the problem. It was not until many years into his adulthood when his mother lay paralyzed by a stroke and was physically unable to respond to him that he could finally acknowledge his fear. The fabric of self is stitched together out of just these holes in our emotional experience. When those aspects that have been unconsciously refused are returned, when they are made conscious, accepted, tolerated, or integrated, the self can then be at one, the need to maintain the self-conscious edifice disappears, and the force of compassion is automatically unleashed. Only when my patient was finally able to acknowledge his own fear at his mother’s emotional unavailability could he begin to feel sympathy for her emotional predicament. His shame had prevented that beforehand. As the famous Zen master Dogen has said:
To study Buddhism is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be one with others.
Through the teachings of the Wheel of Life we are reminded that it is not enough to expose the inhibitions in just one or two of the six realms; we must do so in all. A person who is cut off from his passions but not from his God–like nature will be as unbalanced and insufferable as a person who suffers from the reverse scenario. Many of the movements in Western psychotherapy have gone very deeply into the sufferings of one particular realm, but none have explored the entire wheel. For example, Freud explored the Animal, or Desire, Realm; the child analyst Melanie Klein, the Hell Realm of anxiety and aggression; the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and the developer of self-psychology Heinz Kohut, the Human Realm of narcissism; and the humanistic psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, the God Realm of peak experiences. All of these approaches have been helpful—indeed, essential—for the treatment of particular sticking points, but they are inherently limiting because each one focuses exclusively on only one dimension. To one degree or another each may well be necessary, but the Buddhist tradition sees the entire mandala as reflective of the neurotic mind, and it therefore requires an approach that can be applied comprehensively.
Within the wheel, the Buddhist technicians of mind emphasize the special opportunity inherent in the Human Realm, out of which the path to liberation is drawn. It is from this realm that the essential meditation technique of bare attention emerges; this strategy undergirds most of the effective therapies developed for each of the other realms. The Human Realm suffuses all of the others, then: it is the linchpin of the wheel, the domain of Narcissus, in search of himself and captured by his own reflection.
With this in mind, let us look more closely at each of the Buddhist realms and the struggles within them. I would like to start with a personal story.
THE HELL REALM
When my daughter was three years old, right around the time that her brother was born, she developed a pronounced fear of the wind. At first we excused it—the wind can be quite strong and gusty coming off the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, and she still seemed so small. We went out of our way to reassure her and shield her, but her fear only grew more intense, and my wife and I began to react with a start ourselves whenever a breeze came up. Other children reacted calmly when the wind blew, but we were huddling in doorways, darting for cover, wrapping each other in layers of protective clothing, and otherwise becoming completely dominated by this burgeoning dread. My daughter was steadily slipping into a Hell Realm, howling with fear at the merest touch of a breeze. She was afraid, she said, either that she would be swept away by the wind, deposited in the sea, and then eaten by a giant whale, or that the wind was going to get inside her and blow her up.
In the Tibetan paintings of the Wheel of Life, beings in Hell Realms are depicted as suffering an assortment of infernal tortures. They can be seen boiling in hot oil, being dismembered by wild animals, freezing, starving, and suffering a variety of other hideous punishments. Being tortured by the wind is not one of the most common, but there was no question about the Hell–ish nature of my daughter’s experience. From a psychodynamic perspective, the Hell Realms are vivid descriptions of aggressive and anxiety states; beings are seen burning with rage or tortured by anxiety. They do not recognize their torturers as products of their own minds, however. They believe themselves to be tortured by outside forces over which they have no control. At the same time that they are completely dominated by their rage or anxiety, they are cut off from those same emotions. They do not see that those unwanted forces are their own, and they are therefore imprisoned in a cell of their own making. The Bodhisattva of Compassion is sometimes inset into the Hell Realm holding a mirror or a purifying flame, indicating that this suffering can only be alleviated by seeing the unwanted emotions in the mirror. When so recognized, the emotions themselves become healing (a point that was not lost on Freud).
A good six months after the flowering of my daughter’s phobia, after a summer vacation spent cowering indoors, we sought an outside consultation. The wind had come to represent an intolerable feeling of my daughter’s, which she had projected from inside of her to the outside world. What could have been so intolerable? Certainly, we recognized that her brother’s birth had had some impact on her, and we were alert to the well-known possibility of sibling rivalry. But she seemed genuinely fond of him, caring and protective, and showed a minimum of hostility toward him. Our attempts at sensitivity to her anger toward her brother had, however, obscured the real picture. Her feelings toward her brother were not creating conflict, but her feelings toward her mother were. It was her rage at the very person whom she so loved and needed that was so intolerable and that we had missed in the face of her apparently loving acceptance of her new brother.
She was furious at her mother, it turned out, but these feelings were so strong and so dangerous that they could not be owned without our help. She had done the best she could without us, protecting us from her rage by eliminating it and taking on the consequences herself. Once we realized the problem, it resolved with incredible speed. My wife engaged my daughter in play that was allowed to develop into a kind of play fighting. My daughter needed little encouragement once she saw that this was not forbidden, and very soon they both collapsed on the floor, laughing, crying, embracing, and pummeling each other. The fear of the wind diminished as my daughter regained her fighting spirit, and for a while we encouraged her to shadow box with the wind or yell at it or race into it. As she came to see that we could tolerate her fury, that her anger at the loss of an exclusive relationship with her mother was understandable, the phobia disappeared. She looks back on the episode now, five years later, with nothing but amusement.
There is a parallel in the legends that surround the transmission of Buddhism from India to Tibet, said to be first accomplished by the great Indian yogi Padma Sambhava in the eighth century. Tibet at that time was dominated by a shamanistic tradition, and Tibetans were deeply superstitious and fearful of the many spirits and magical forces felt to be lurking in the outside world. Padma Sambhava, it is told, engaged the best shamans of the indigenous Bon religion in a competition in which he proved his magic powers to be superior, beating them at their own game. In the process, he is said to have defeated the powerful animal–headed demons of the lower realms and converted them to protectors of Buddhism, revealing their true natures as aspects of the enlightened mind rather than as demonic forces. The Tibetan tradition has since been replete with images of such beings “stomping on the corpse of ego,” representing the harnessing of painful emotion and the progression from projection, paranoia, and fear to integration and clear vision.
When we refuse to acknowledge the presence of unwanted feelings, we are as bound to them as when we give ourselves over to them indignantly and self–righteously. Religion has traditionally counseled believers to withdraw from aggressive, erotic, or egotistical states of mind, replacing them with the “purer” states of devotion, humility, or piety. Psychoanalysis has encouraged its adherents to be less fearful of these emotions, to understand their roots and recover the energy that has been lost through the failure to accept primitive urges or longings. Buddhism, alone among the world’s religions, has taken a characteristically middle path, recognizing the need to be free from destructive emotions while at the same time seeing that such freedom comes through nonjudgmental awareness of just those emotions from which we seek freedom.
As the Hell Realm seems primarily associated with states of fear and aggression, the contributions of Winnicott on the necessity of hate in the growing child may be instructive in illustrating the attitude that the Buddhists encourage toward such feelings. Winnicott sees the infant as possessing a natural urge to be at one with that which she loves, seeking to destroy the mother’s separateness with a ruthlessness and singlemindedness that any woman who has nursed her children will attest to. He developed the concept of the “good enough mother” who could manage this attack without being destroyed, who could survive the assault without withdrawing in horror, retaliating with fury, or otherwise abdicating her maternal presence.3 Part of this “good enough” response is also to resist the destruction perpetrated by the child, to stand her ground, set limits, define a boundary, and thereby induce some element of frustration into the baby’s experience. The other part of the good enough response is to permit the rage, to accept the rupture that it heralds. This facilitates the maturation of the child from a state that Winnicott calls “object relating” to one of “object usage” that is, from a state in which the mother is experienced as nothing but an extension of the infant to one in which the mother’s separateness is grasped.
The child’s hatred and aggressive urges, when properly met and “held” by the mother, force a destruction of the infant’s own outmoded ways of relating. When improperly met, the child’s rage knows no bounds, and she becomes relegated to a Hell-ish existence. As Winnicott implies, failures in this sphere often bring people into psychotherapy or propel them into meditation. One of the contributions of the Buddhist approach is its ability to teach a method of relating to one’s own rage that is the psychic equivalent of Winnicott’s “holding.”
THE ANIMAL REALM
The Animal Realm is the realm of instinctual gratification, of the biological drives of hunger and sexuality. In the Tibetan cosmology, its distinctive characteristic is stupidity. The Bodhisattva image inset into this dimension is shown holding a book, which represents the capacity for thought, speech, and reflection that is lacking in our animal natures. Such an image may also represent the idea of sublimation that Freud was to develop out of his own exploration of these instincts, drives, or urges.
Freud’s explanations dovetail with the Buddhists’ in the realization that ultimate happiness cannot be derived from sensual pleasures. There are inherent limitations to the pleasures of sexual gratification, Freud found. By mining the nature of sexuality, he came to the paradoxical conclusion that there is “something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself [that] is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.”4 Rather than unleashing a never-ending torrent of unregulated passion, as many sexually conflicted persons fear, integration of the Animal Realm inevitably reveals pleasure to be inherently fleeting. It cannot be sustained forever, we find, and its completion returns us to a state of impoverishment, of unrest, of separateness, desire, or tension. Freud’s description of pleasure elucidates a basic Buddhist concept, namely, that the pursuit of pleasurable sensory experiences leads inevitably to a state of dissatisfaction, because it is in the nature of pleasure not to be sustainable:
What we call happiness in the strict sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as a periodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.5
Although sexual pleasure has become much more accepted since Freud’s time, the inhibitions around freedom and happiness in sexuality have certainly not disappeared. They have perhaps been complemented by an attitude of indulgence, by an attempt to extract lasting pleasure or meaning from what is essentially a transient pleasure, but the inhibitions described by Freud persist, at least for some people. In fact, some who develop an interest in Buddhism have a tendency to try to escape from unresolved sexual issues through meditation, but this usually works only for a time. The more likely scenario is that the sexual issues become more pressing because of the spiritual work.
A number of my patients with extensive meditation experience have come into therapy after discovering unavoidable sexual issues through their practices. One woman, after spending years on retreat in India, found she could no longer avoid the truth of her homosexuality. Her biggest fear was of disappointing her homophobic and fragile parents, whom she knew would take the news as a reflection of their own “failings.” Another patient, raised in a strictly Catholic Korean home, came into therapy after several intensive retreats emphasizing to me one too many times that he could take or leave sex, that he felt no urgency, not even a strong desire for orgasm when having sex. Beneath these claims lay his desire to integrate his sexuality and his fears that such an integration was impossible, that his animal nature would overwhelm him if he gave it a chance. Like the patients with trouble integrating their anger, he tended to see his sexuality as an “it,” as something separate that threatened the rest of him. At one point in the therapy he had a dream of his family’s church being invaded and overwhelmed by dancing and drinking heathen revelers. At another point, he regaled me with stories about a recent trip to a sadomasochism parlor where he had experimented with various kinds of domination. He wanted to show me, he said, just how dangerous it was going to be for him to unleash his passions, just how far his erotic imagination could take him. Once he became less embarrassed about his erotic yearnings, however, they began to take their natural place, and unencumbered by them, he was able to proceed with his spiritual work and his life. Paradoxically, looking at the Animal Realm was the only way for him not to be stuck there. This is a lesson that many spiritual groups of both East and West have had to learn over and over again. Ignoring the Animal Realm only seems to empower it, as the sexual scandals that have rocked spiritual groups and leaders testify. Sexuality is a threat to spirituality only when it is not integrated.
While the Animal Realm cannot be ignored, it can be put in its place. Sexuality certainly does not require the indulgence that is often associated with it, but it does not have to be separated from the enlightened mind. Indeed, the Tibetan tradition makes liberal use of copulation as a metaphor for the enlightened mind, and advanced Tantric meditation practices, which are taught to monks after years of preparation in order to catalyze an awakening, often culminate in a ritualized act of sexual intercourse.
THE REALM OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS
The Hungry Ghosts are probably the most vividly drawn metaphors in the Wheel of Life. Phantomlike creatures with withered limbs, grossly bloated bellies, and long, thin necks, the Hungry Ghosts in many ways represent a fusion of rage and desire. Tormented by unfulfilled cravings and insatiably demanding of impossible satisfactions, the Hungry Ghosts are searching for gratification for old unfulfilled needs whose time has passed. They are beings who have uncovered a terrible emptiness within themselves, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting something that has already happened. Their ghostlike state represents their attachment to the past.
In addition, these beings, while impossibly hungry and thirsty, cannot drink or eat without causing themselves terrible pain or indigestion. The very attempts to satisfy themselves cause more pain. Their long, thin throats are so narrow and raw that swallowing produces unbearable burning and irritation. Their bloated bellies are in turn unable to digest nourishment; attempts at gratification only yield a more intense hunger and craving. These are beings who cannot take in a present-day, albeit transitory, satisfaction. They remain obsessed with the fantasy of achieving complete release from the pain of their past and are stubbornly unaware that their desire is fantasy. It is this knowledge that such people are estranged from, for their fantasy must be owned as fantasy. The Hungry Ghosts must come in contact with the ghostlike nature of their own longings.
This is not an easy thing for a hungry ghost to accomplish, however, even with the help of a psychotherapist. Indeed, the problems of the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts are increasingly turning up in psychotherapists’ offices. A recent patient of mine, for example, an accomplished teacher of French literature named Tara, personified the predicament of the hungry ghost. Describing a long succession of relationships with other accomplished academics at the top of their fields, Tara repeatedly developed an impassioned relationship with one such man while already involved with another. Invariably, she kept the man whom she was actually living with at bay. She would quickly and critically uncover all of his faults, lose interest in him sexually, and essentially prevent him from touching her, either physically or emotionally. At the same time, she would begin to fantasize about the next luminary to enter her life. While very experienced sexually, she rarely reached orgasm and confessed to a vague discomfort with sexual intimacy. She remembered an unhappy and critical mother who had rarely touched her as a child and who had once, in a fit of pique, ripped up and destroyed Tara’s teddy bear, because of Tara’s obstinacy. Tara came to therapy after first trying to practice Zen meditation (zazen), which she found herself inexplicably terrified of, to the point of having to bolt from the meditation hall (zendo) in lieu of sitting with herself.
Tara was searching insatiably for the kind of nourishment that she had once needed but that was now inappropriate to who she was as an adult woman. (Even if she could have found someone to hold her as her mother never had, it is unlikely that this would have been satisfying for very long. Instead, such behaviors would have seemed suffocating, being no longer relevant to her adult needs.) She feared what she also most desired (being touched) and was unable to experience the transitory satisfactions available to her. The possibility of a relationship with one man only stimulated a resurgent fantasy of a liberating relationship with another, and Tara could not see that as an unreachable fantasy. Indeed, she was very resistant to even discussing these fantasies. She was driven by them but unable to acknowledge their reality, let alone their unreality. It was only when she began to be able to articulate her yearnings that she could feel the pain of her mother’s treatment of her. At this point, her fear of zazen began to diminish, and her compulsive need to denigrate those who sought intimacy with her began to become conscious.
In the traditional depiction of the Wheel of Life, the Bodhisattva of Compassion appears in the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts carrying a bowl filled with objects symbolic of spiritual nourishment. The message is clear: Food and drink will not satisfy the unfulfilled needs of this realm. Only the nonjudgmental awareness perfected by the Buddha offers relief.
This desperate longing for inexhaustible abundance is very common in the Western psyche, where it masquerades under the heading of “low self-esteem.” It is a mind state that has, paradoxically, proved difficult for many Eastern Buddhist teachers to understand in their Western students. The extent of inner feelings of emptiness and unworthiness in the Western psyche has seemed all but unbelievable to teachers raised in the East, and the compelling fantasies of reparation that are often attached to those same teachers are rarely dealt with in any kind of thorough psychoanalytic fashion. Just as the emptiness of the Hungry Ghosts must be experienced in such a way that reparation is no longer sought from impossible sources, so the Western student afflicted with such feelings must make the emptiness itself the object of his or her meditation. Only then can self-loathing be transformed into wisdom, a task in which both psychotherapy and meditation may well collaborate.
THE GOD REALM
In the Buddhist cosmology, the Heaven Realms are places of sensual bliss and gratification, of rapture and aesthetic pleasures. They are inhabited by beings with subtle bodies, not prone to illness, who delight in music and dance and exist in extended versions of what has come to be called peak experiences, in which the participant dissolves into the experience of pleasure, merging with the beloved and temporarily eradicating the ego boundaries. This is the state that has been called confluence in Gestalt therapy: the merger of orgasm, the assimilation of digested food, the attunement of the infant at the breast, the satisfaction of any completed experience in which a new whole is created and the self temporarily dissolves. Such experiences are powerful states, cultivated in Buddhist practices but also warned against in Buddhist teachings, because of their ability to induce complacency with what remains at base a temporary interruption or refuge. The Bodhisattva of Compassion appears in the God Realm holding a lute, thus signifying the musical pleasures of that dimension, but also alerting those in this realm to the sounds of the Buddha’s teachings, waking them, as it were, from their slumber or trance. Their pleasures are temporary, sounds the lute: they are forgetting the sufferings of others; they are resting on their laurels and will one day fall from grace.
Psychologically, difficulties with confluence are of at least two types: a clinging to what comes to be an unhealthy confluence and a pulling back from, or estrangement from, healthy confluence. In the first category are those who demand the sense of at-one-ness from their children, lovers, friends, parents, co-workers, or other intimates and who refuse to allow the necessary “otherness” that permits those others to breathe. These are people who become frightened by the loss of connection, who stifle their own aggressive urges because such urges are “selfish,” and who find others’ wishes intolerable when they conflict with their own wishes. They are the “enablers” in alcoholic families or the “codependents” in neurotic ones. In the second category are those who, usually because of early deprivations or prodding into independence, crave, and yet are made anxious by, the ego dissolution of confluence. Never having sufficiently experienced the relaxation of the parental embrace in early childhood, they are understandably frightened by the approach of its corollary in adulthood, and they tense, or pull back, at the moment of orgasm, guarding the very ego boundaries that they were induced to create prematurely. They are usually unaware of this tensing and feel cheated somehow, but they cannot recognize the source of their feeling of continued isolation.
A friend of mine named James, for example, remembers a critical moment in his adolescence that baffled and bothered him for the next twenty years. It came as a result of his first taste of the God Realm. At age sixteen, just after having gotten his driver’s license, he asked out a young woman on whom he had silently had a crush for two years. Their blissful evening culminated in several hours of making out after her parents had gone to bed, and he felt happier than he could ever remember feeling. But he went home that night and never called her again, and he never understood why. This same man, twenty years later, was made unduly anxious when his wife had a need to withdraw from him, when her emotional experience did not match his own. His relationship to the God-like state of confluence was very fragile. As an adolescent, he had both sought the experience and fled from it; as an adult, he could not bear to see it dissolve, having no confidence in his own capacity to re-create it. He was made anxious by both its presence and its absence.
As an essential component of the Wheel of Life, the God Realm represents the person’s ability to relax ego boundaries, to dissolve temporarily, to acknowledge the joy of connection and of aesthetic and intellectual pleasures. It is the place of reverberation and resonance that the psychoanalyst Michael Eigen has described as the inexhaustible “nuclear joy kernel” that causes the infant to smile.6 Experiences in this realm, according to the Buddhists, are part of the human capacity and need not be feared. They are routinely accessed in meditation practice, for instance, but they are no more sustainable than are the sensory pleasures that so preoccupied Freud. In fact, when they become the object of craving, they themselves become a potent cause of suffering. Freud’s powerful descriptions of mystical experiences as “oceanic” fit neatly into this cosmology: there are indeed meditation experiences that evoke an oceanic feeling of oneness with the universe, but these are experiences of the God Realm; they are not the mystical experiences that the Buddha described as essential to his psychology of analytic meditation.
THE REALM OF THE JEALOUS GODS
The Realm of the Jealous Gods (or Titans) is sometimes depicted as a part of the God Realm and sometimes as its own area. In either case, the two sets of beings are separated by a fruit-laden “wishing-tree,” over whose fruits the Jealous Gods are fighting. These beings, which embody the ego’s aggressive strivings, are trying to garner the fruits of the gods through relentless competitive force. They represent the energy that is needed to overcome a frustration, change a situation, or make contact with a new experience. When the contact is accomplished, it yields the gratification of the God Realm, but it is the Jealous Gods who embody the aggressive force necessary to approach, destroy, and assimilate the obstacles to that satisfaction.
It is interesting that this realm of ego and aggression is presented as one of the upper realms, despite Buddhism’s reputation as passive, stoical, and anti-ego. The classic ego functions of taming, mastery, self-control, and adaptation are clearly valued in the Buddhist cosmology. Indeed, they form the basis for the key meditation practice of mindfulness, in which the ego functions themselves are recruited for the cultivation of moment-to-moment awareness. The Bodhisattva of Compassion appears in this locale wielding a flaming sword, symbolic of discriminating awareness. The presence of this sword reinforces the point that the aggressive nature of ego is not seen as the problem; this energy is in fact valued and is necessary in the spiritual path. The objects of this striving, the fruits of the wishing-tree, are seen as ultimately disappointing, however. The Bodhisattva of Compassion urges the Jealous Gods to redirect their aggression, destroying and assimilating the unawareness that keeps them estranged from themselves. In just this way, meditation practice seeks to kidnap the various ego functions, reorienting them away from attempts at possession of “things” and toward the achievement of discriminating awareness. In order to accomplish this, however, the ego functions themselves must first be freed.
This freeing of the ego functions is often the task of psychotherapy. One patient of mine, a writer who was having trouble completing a project that she seemed very excited about, remembers her father always telling her that she was getting “too excited” as she rushed to tell him about her experience, even as she felt that he had no time for her. “If you put a broom up your ass, you could sweep while you go,” he would say. So she learned to clamp down on her excitement, keeping everything under control and her body rigid, and developed disabling headaches as a consequence. Her aggressive, excited energy was turned back on her own body rather than enjoyed and used to accomplish something. The idea that she could savor her excitement came as a revelation and a challenge.
A former neighbor of mine showed his estrangement from this important ego function in another characteristic way. He would brood and sulk, rather than directly approach a person from whom he desired something. In his adult life, he manifested this most directly with his lover, with whom he would become petulant and demanding in an unspoken way that attempted to make the lover do his aggressive work for him. Rather than approach his lover when he wanted sex, for instance, he would languish in an aggressively forlorn state while imagining him, the lover, having sex with previous boyfriends. His anger emerged in his dreams, he confided to me, but even then, found no real outlet. In one such dream, for example, after he tried to attack as his lover fled in a spaceship, the scene changed dramatically to reveal an endless, desolate desert where everything was immobile, beautiful, and lonely. His fantasies and dreams defined what he did with this crucial energy of the Jealous Gods: he paralyzed himself, cut himself off from his own aggression, and, like the beings of the Hell Realms, began to experience that aggression as directed against himself by his loved one through the lover’s imagined infidelity. He was left bereft, immobile, and out of touch.
THE HUMAN REALM
As a representation of the neurotic mind, then, the Wheel of Life shows not just how beings can be self-indulgent but also how they hide from themselves. The developing infant needs to hate in order to truly love, sexual passion must be lived in order to understand its limitations, fantasies of gratification of unfulfilled needs must be understood as fantasies in order for actual gratification to be appreciated, ego functions must be freed in order to use them for spiritual, as well as worldly, purposes, and ego boundaries must be temporarily relaxed in order for confluence to be understood as a natural outcome of satisfying contact instead of some kind of unapproachable heaven state. It is in the Human Realm that this tendency to hide from oneself is most pronounced, however.
If the lower realms are concerned, as Freud was, with unacceptable desires, and if the God Realm and Realm of the Jealous Gods are the province of ego functions and their temporary dissolution, then the Human Realm is concerned with what has come to be known as the self (or the lack thereof). More accurately, it is the realm of the search for self, the central concern of the relatively recent psychology of narcissism and in some way the abiding concern of all creative activity. The Bodhisattva of Compassion appears in this domain in the form Of the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni, an Indian prince of the fifth century B.C., who is depicted with the alms bowl and staff of an ascetic engaged in the accepted Buddhist strategy of the search for identity.
The central predicament of the Human Realm is that we do not really know who we are. As Winnicott was fond of proposing, “Although healthy persons communicate and enjoy communicating, the other fact is equally true, that each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.”7 We are aware of vague and disturbing feelings of emptiness, inauthenticity, and alienation, and we have some sense of the lack of acknowledgment, attention, or recognition—of what the psychoanalysts call mirroring—that might lie behind these disturbing feelings. But we are fundamentally unsure.
We can see how this feeling is passed through the generations. When a child, seeking contact with another person rather than just instinctual gratification, comes up against a narcissistic parent, too preoccupied with her own search to attend to the child’s, the child is left with a feeling of absence that becomes the seed of her own fear and insecurity. Such a child is forced to construct what Winnicott called a “False Self” to manage the demands of the alternatively intrusive and ignoring parent. The person then struggles against this necessary construction, the false self, in the attempt to feel real. The false self is created to deal with an impossible situation; as a construction, it eventually rigidities and obscures more spontaneous personal expressions, cutting the person off from herself. Part of Winnicott’s point is that the child of a narcissistic parent has reason to hide from that parent once she has felt that parent’s lack of interest. As Winnicott commented, “It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.”8
A patient of mine, a thirty-year-old painter named Lily, gave me a good description of the genesis of this sense of falseness in the memory of an incident from her childhood. She remembers discovering a paisley shirt in her attic when she was about six years old and insisting on wearing it to school the next day without a jacket so that she could show off her new find. Her mother grew enraged, insisted that she wear a coat, and finally blurted out, “What kind of mother will people think I am? You are a reflection of me!” Lily remembers going to school the next day, with her jacket on, thinking, “I am invisible; I am nothing but a reflection of my mother!”
I once saw a patient, another psychotherapist, who began her therapy with the image of herself as a five-year-old girl in pigtails who was hiding behind a huge billboard proclaiming all of her achievements. Her fantasy was of being rescued from behind the billboard. But, mindful of Winnicott’s injunctions, I asked her only how it felt to be noticed in such a good hiding place.
From the Buddhist perspective, the Human Realm is not just about the false self but is also about the possibility of transcendent insight into the true nature of self. It is here that the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) can be appreciated. The Buddhists assert that the more we grasp emptiness, the more we feel real—that the core, the incommunicado element, is really a place of fear at our own insubstantiality. This is why we defend it so fiercely, why we do not want to be discovered, and why we feel so vulnerable as we approach our most personal and private feelings of ourselves. In approaching that privacy without fear, the Buddhist practices make possible a sense of genuine liberation rather than permanent isolation.
GREED, HATRED, AND DELUSION
At the core of the Wheel of Life, circling endlessly, are the driving forces of greed, hatred, and delusion, represented by a red cock, a green snake, and a black hog, each one biting the tail of its neighbor, to indicate their interconnectedness. These are the forces that perpetuate our estrangement from ourselves and that keep us bound to the wheel, unable to appreciate the insights of the Buddha and imprisoned by our own runaway minds. Our confusion about ourselves, our fear and insecurity, our ignorance or delusion, in the Buddhist parlance, keep us grasping at pleasant experiences and rejecting of unpleasant ones, despite the fruitlessness of such efforts.
The first wave of psychoanalysis, the classical period of Freud and his followers that extended into the 1950s, was primarily concerned with uncovering repressed desire and anger, or Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts, which in some way correspond to the Buddhist mandala’s snake and cock. The next wave, of object relations and narcissism that has dominated the past thirty years, exposed the gap within: the emptiness, inauthenticity, or alienation that results from estrangement from our true selves and our confusion or ignorance about our own true natures. In the Buddhist view, this is the black hog of delusion, the root or precondition of greed and hatred. Psychoanalysts have been able to identify ignorance, but they have not been able to work with it directly, beyond postulating the incommunicado self that had to be let alone. This was certainly an advance: exposing our narcissism is an essential precondition for transforming it. But the meditative traditions are where we find a lucid methodology for working directly with our confusion about ourselves.
It is tempting to see Buddhism as advocating escape from the Wheel of Life and psychotherapy as encouraging adjustment to it, and this is in fact what a number of early translators, teachers, and students of Buddhism proposed. Yet, as noted earlier, it is an axiom of Buddhism that nirvana is samsara. The Bodhisattva images inset into each realm of the Wheel of Life imply that it is possible to learn another way of relating to the emotions of each dimension. This is the sense in which the enlightened person is said to be in the world but not of it.
This vision differs markedly from that held by many in the psychoanalytic community who tend to view the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion as instincts or drives that, by definition, could not develop or mature. Indeed, there is a sharp division within the psychoanalytic field about whether to view the sexual and aggressive drives as capable of development and maturation at all. On the one hand are those who see the id as a “seething cauldron” of primitive energy that must be mastered or regulated and kept under firm control. On the other hand are those who see the possibility of transformation of the infantile drives through the process of giving them “access to consciousness.”9
The Buddha’s vision is definitely of the latter persuasion. The entire Wheel of Life is but a representation of the possibility of transforming suffering by changing the way we relate to it. As the Buddha taught in his final exhortation to his faithful attendant Ananda, it is only through becoming a “lamp unto yourself” that enlightenment can be won.
Liberation from the Wheel of Life does not mean escape, the Buddha implied. It means clear perception of oneself, of the entire range of the human experience: “Things are not what they seem,” says the Lankavatara Sutra, which was translated into Chinese in 443 A.D. “Nor are they otherwise…. Deeds exist, but no doer can be found.”10
This emphasis on the lack of a particular, substantive agent is the most distinctive aspect of traditional Buddhist psychological thought; it is the realization that transforms the experience of the Wheel of Life. But such a conception is not completely outside the realm of psychoanalysis. True thoughts “require no thinker,” the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion echoed. When psychotherapists are identified with their insights, he maintained, their contributions become “psychoanalytically worthless.”11
It is in this idea of “thoughts without a thinker” that psychoanalysis has approached the Buddhist view, for it is the elimination of narcissism that Bion is suggesting, a possibility that Buddhism also holds dear. The entire thrust of the Buddha’s teaching was directed toward trying to convey this as a real possibility. He was at first reluctant even to attempt to communicate his realization, fearing that no one would grasp it. But he ultimately relented, and then formulated his first teachings as the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. The Buddha’s first truth highlights the inevitability of humiliation in our lives and his second truth speaks of the primal thirst that makes such humiliation inevitable. His third truth promises release and his fourth truth spells out the means of accomplishing that release. In essence, the Buddha was articulating a vision of a psyche freed from narcissism. His Four Noble Truths are the key to understanding the Buddhist psychology of mind.