In the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, he suggested that our lives are colored by a pervasive feeling of unsatisfactoriness. He used the word dukkha to describe this feeling and said that it was one of the fundamental characteristics of psychological experience. We want what we can’t have and don’t want what we do have; we want more of what we like and less of what we don’t like. We are always a little bit hungry, or a little bit defensive, anticipating the slipping away of that which we have worked so hard to achieve. Behind every suffering, Buddhist teachers say, is the desire for things to be different. This attempt to control or manage what cannot be changed interferes with our going on being. We worry about the past and anticipate the future or worry about the future and anticipate the past. Our self-centeredness causes us to create an uneasy relationship with the world in which we try to fend off any threats to our hard-fought security. This sets up an indefensible position; we become like a fortress: a self within a mind within a body that is threatened from all sides. As I discovered in my beginning explorations of meditation, my mind was scurrying about in all directions trying to maintain a semblance of control, but this was exhausting or, in contemporary parlance, highly stressful.
As a therapist I have found that a similar process is at work. The desire for control, in the form of being a helper, is as much of an obstacle to healing another person as it is to healing oneself. It is necessary in therapeutic work to avoid trying to accomplish too much. A provocative British psychoanalyst, W. R. Bion, famously declared that a therapist must be free from memory and desire if he is to be of any use to his patients. To think about the end of a session, to wonder what time it is, even to hope for a cure, is to add an agenda that becomes an interference, because it is sensed as a demand. People are exquisitely sensitive to each other, especially in a stripped-down relationship like a therapeutic one. “If the psychoanalyst has not deliberately divested himself of memory and desire,” said Bion in his 1970 classic Attention and Interpretation, “the patient can ‘feel’ this and is dominated by the ‘feeling’ that he is possessed by and contained in the analyst’s state of mind, namely, the state represented by ‘desire.’“7 The therapist’s identity as a “helper” is felt as an implicit demand, and the patient is disrupted as a result. Desire becomes an intrusion, and the patient goes into an all-too-familiar reactive mode.
Through my meditation I have seen how openness can contain and transform fear, and how striving interferes with this process. Without quite knowing how it was happening, I found an approach to psychotherapy that puts less of an emphasis on understanding and more of a focus on experiencing than I was ever taught in my formal education. When I first came upon Bion’s words, I felt right at home, even though many in the field considered him too difficult to understand, too arcane or even mystical. In his later work, Bion developed a system, or a private symbolic language, to express his belief that the quest for knowledge interferes with the emotional truth of therapy, as the quest for insight interferes with meditation. He called the emotional truth O, and wrote of how premature attempts to understand get in the way of it.
I remember coming upon a description of O in a book by Michael Eigen and being thrilled. I read it aloud to my wife at the dinner table, and we both marveled at the prose. “(The psychoanalyst Marion) Milner speaks of Bion’s O as zero, but O is also Omega, everythingness and nothingness,” writes Eigen. “At times Bion uses O to signal the unknown emotional reality of a session, or of a series of transformations, or of group events, or of the cosmos. O may represent the impact of the Other, the shock of impact that sets off waves of feelings, sensations, presentiments. As we ride these waves we may utter a rapturous ‘Oh, Oh!’ or an ‘Oh-Oh!’ of trepidation. 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.”8 Rapture? Streamings? Pulsations? Orgasm? This was a psychoanalyst I could trust, and one I wanted to know better.
In another particularly vivid passage, Bion describes the unknowability of reality as follows: “It is impossible to know reality for the same reason that makes it impossible to sing potatoes; they may be grown, or pulled, or eaten, but not sung. Reality has to be ‘been’: there should be a transitive verb ‘to be’ expressly for use with the term ‘reality.’ ”9 In both of these passages, Bion’s insights approach those of the Buddha. If the mind can be dislodged from its need to concretize reality, something transformative can happen. It is faith, concluded Bion, that permits this kind of being. It is the kind of faith that allows us to jump off a high diving board with the knowledge that we will hit water and not earth. My meditative explorations inculcated me with this kind of faith, but my psychotherapeutic ones have confirmed it. Having learned to jump into my own reality, I am no longer shy about jumping into another’s. But it is Buddhism, with its emphasis on the Eightfold Path, that has taught me how not to be an interference in my own right.
As the Buddha articulated the rest of his Four Noble Truths (craving or clinging as the cause of dukkha, nirvana as release from it), he elaborated what became known as the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. These were his directions to nirvana, his description of the dimensions of our lives that require discipline or restraint. They were his means of purifying the mind, of making it lofty, straight, and without obstructions. They were his method of shaping the mind so that it could remain composed in the midst of ceaseless change. They were also his way of training us to deal with three fundamental realities of existence, realities that he called dukkha (or unsatisfactoriness), anicca (or impermanence), and anatta (or insubstantiality).
While there are eight aspects to the Buddha’s Path (Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration), the eight are often grouped into three overarching categories: Right View (encompassing Understanding and Thought), Right Relationship (consisting of Speech, Action, and Livelihood), and Right Meditation (Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration).
The three teachers whom I met when I first discovered Buddhism each had a particular emphasis that came to correspond, in my mind, with one of the three aspects of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Ram Dass, with his background in psychology and his ability to make the traditional wisdom of India intelligible to the Western mind, represented Right View. Jack Kornfield, whose years of solitary retreat in a Thai monastery were balanced by an emergent need for family and community, taught the essentials of Right Relationship. And Joseph Goldstein, whose command of classical Buddhist psychology was enhanced by his devotion to intensive meditation, was the embodiment of Right Meditation. All three were newly returned from Asia, where each had developed a relationship with an elder teacher who had guided and inspired him. I was as curious about these relationships as I was about the teachings, sensing the therapeutic nature of those encounters. In their own idiosyncratic ways, these three teachers made the Buddha’s wisdom come alive for me. I was fortunate to become their student while at the same time getting to know them personally.
The most well-known of the three was Ram Dass, who had once been named Richard Alpert. When I first met him he was teaching the Bhagavad Gita at Naropa, a Hindu mythological epic about devotion and duty, but his lectures were peppered with his own emerging understanding of the principles of Buddhism. Ram Dass hardly needed the platform of the Bhagavad Gita to teach from, however. His own story was already operatic in scope and mythic in proportion. We would sit and listen to him for hours, soaking up his humor as he recounted the by now familiar details of his own pilgrimage. Ram Dass’s message was “You are not who you think you are.” He undercut as many manifestations of the false, caretaker self as he could find. He had already changed identities several times in his life, evolving from a materialistic, ambitious young professor into an apostle for psychedelia and then to a spiritual teacher. In addressing his own narcissism, he made clear how possible it was to detach from the needs of the ego.
After a successful beginning as an academic psychologist at Harvard, a terrain that was all too familiar to me at the time, the ambitious Dr. Alpert dove, with his colleague Timothy Leary, into the uncharted terrain of research on the psychedelic drug LSD. After several years of increasing confrontation with the academic community and public exposure of their personal explorations, Alpert was dismissed from his position. (The man who fired him, Dr. David McClelland, the chairman of the psychology department at the time, was a professor of mine when I was at Harvard who was rumored to still be close to Ram Dass. He taught courses on Human Motivation and managed to make no references to Ram Dass in his lectures, much to our disappointment.) Released from his academic moorings, Alpert set out for India in 1967, intrigued by the connections he and Leary had already noticed between their psychedelic experiences and Asian spiritual texts like the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He had gone as far as he could with LSD, Alpert decided; now he wanted to find someone who knew something of the realms of consciousness that the drug had opened up for him.
After driving all the way to Nepal in a state-of-the-art, $7,000 Land Rover, accumulating beautiful objects but frustrated in his quest for a realized master, Alpert eventually stumbled upon an elderly and irascible Hindu guru in India known as Maharaj-ji, or Neem Karoli Baba. Teasing Alpert from the start, Maharaj-ji grabbed hold of his heart by suddenly making reference to the death of Alpert’s mother. “You were out under the stars last night,” he said to him in Hindi at their first meeting. “You were thinking about your mother.” Alpert was startled, since he had told no one who or what he was thinking about. “She died last year,” Maharaj-ji continued. “She got very big in the belly before she died.” Alpert’s mother had indeed died of a ruptured spleen. Then Maharaj-ji looked Alpert in the eye and said very suddenly in English, “Spleen.”
This was the beginning of Alpert’s devotion to Maharaj-ji and the point of departure for his transformation into Ram Dass. It provoked a catharsis in which Alpert’s rational, thinking mind (his primary defensive tool) was temporarily paralyzed, flooding him with the kinds of buried feelings that signal a return of going on being. But it was not the end of Maharaj-ji’s teachings. Still preoccupied with his experiences with LSD, Ram Dass resolved one evening to speak to his guru about the drug. The next morning Maharaj-ji called for him and immediately demanded the “medicine.” At first unsure of what Maharaj-ji might mean (he was unused to thinking of the drug as medicine, even though he was carrying it in pill form), Ram Dass soon realized what was being asked of him and ran to his car to fetch the drug. Maharaj-ji held out his hand, demanded three of the pills, popped them in his mouth, and continued on with his day. Nothing seemed to happen to him.
Ram Dass was amazed. Nothing had happened. For Ram Dass at the time, this was the ultimate demonstration of some kind of spiritual attainment. He knew firsthand how powerful the drug could be, and yet here was someone who was totally untouched by it, someone more powerful than LSD. Ram Dass’s attachment to the drug was loosened. He came back to America and began to tell his story, but still, somewhere in the back of his mind, he harbored doubts about what he had seen. “Perhaps he hadn’t really swallowed them,” he thought to himself. “Maybe he just threw them over his shoulder.” On his next trip to India, Maharaj-ji called to him again, asking, as if he couldn’t quite remember, “Say, did you give me any medicine last time you were in India? Did I take it?”
Ram Dass answered somewhat equivocally, “Well, I think so.”
“Oh, did it have any effect on me?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh. Go away,” Maharaj-ji said. The next morning he called to him again. “You got any more of that medicine?” he asked. “Bring it.”
Ram Dass gave him the equivalent of five pills this time. Very slowly, Maharaj-ji took each pill and placed it into his mouth, making sure that he could be seen swallowing each one. Then he began to act agitated. He called for water, questioned Ram Dass about how long the drug would take to act, called for a wristwatch, and then asked, “Will it make me crazy?”
“Probably,” said Ram Dass, and Maharaj-ji at that point went down underneath his blanket and came up making all kinds of strange faces. But the joke was on Ram Dass. Maharaj-ji was just playing with him.
At the end of an hour he asked him, “You got anything stronger?” Again, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Ram Dass stayed with Maharaj-ji all day and nothing happened. At one point Maharaj-ji told him that drugs like this were known in India long ago but that knowledge about them was now lost. “It’s useful, it’s useful, not the true samadhi, but it’s useful,” he said, using a Sanskrit word for meditative attainment to make his point. Later he told the young Westerners who were starting to gather around him in India, “If you’re in a cool place and you’re quiet and you’re feeling much peace and your mind is turned toward God, it’s useful.” You could have a visit with a holy man in that place, he said. But, he added, you can’t stay there, it doesn’t last. That’s why it’s better to become the saint rather than just visit him.10 Ram Dass was amazed at this display of psychic power. He knew from firsthand experience how the ego could be decimated by LSD. But here was a man who was unfazed by it. Maharaj-ji’s ego was so flexible, so transparent, that the drug did not seem to touch him.
This was the first point that Ram Dass was communicating that summer in Boulder. There was a limit to what altered states of consciousness could provide. Getting high was not the same as being free, cautioned this apostle of psychedelia. “Once you get the message, you have to hang up the phone,” he would say, in answer to innumerable questions about mind-altering drugs. There was something called sadhana, one’s own spiritual work, that required diligence, commitment, honesty, and responsibility. Sadhana required working with our own minds, our own hearts, our thoughts, feelings, relationships, emotions, and physical selves. All of the stuff of daily life could be, as he put it, “grist for the mill” of awakening.
For me, Ram Dass was like Moses. Already in his 40s, with a long graying beard and flowing white robes, he seemed like an elder statesman to my young eyes. And he had talked to God in the form of Maharaj-ji. Pointing the way to a new kind of freedom, he made me feel as if my wanderings in the desert might come to a close. LSD was not exactly the golden calf, but we did need to do something other than just worship at the altar of altered states. If we wanted to end our suffering, we had to do a more subtle and far-reaching thing. We had to discover our true natures.
Ram Dass never hid too much of his personal drama from us. His sexual cravings, the illness and death of his father, his despair over the recent death of Maharaj-ji, his own attachments to being smart or right or in control all figured into his teachings. While he did not claim to have completed his quest, he was willing to share the fruits of his journey, and for a twenty-year-old college student like myself who was just getting oriented, this was very useful.
“You are not who you think you are,” Ram Dass repeated over and over again, each time throwing my mind into confusion. Thinking was what I did best. How could I know myself if whatever I thought was wrong? There is a kind of knowing that is beyond thought, suggested Ram Dass, that has to do with being, as opposed to doing. He even titled his best-selling book Be Here Now. Maharaj-ji had been a living example of this kind of being: a transformative example. Insight erupts out of this kind of being, Ram Dass implied. It does not come from thinking, it comes from learning how to restrain the thinking mind. For someone like me, raised in the backyards of academia and vaguely dissatisfied with the worldview of scientific materialism, this idea of something beyond the scope of the rational mind was both unsettling and enticing. I knew I was good at learning, but I was not so sure how good I could be at unlearning.
Ram Dass told a story that I enjoyed a great deal. It was about his first Zen Buddhist retreat, called a sesshin, which had taken place in a Benedictine monastery under the tutelage of a Zen master named Sasaki Roshi. A number of other well-known spiritual teachers were in attendance, among them the Hindu teacher Swami Satchidananda, the writer and Taoist scholar Alan Watts, the Sufi leader Pir Vilayat Khan, and Brother David, a Christian monk. It was a spiritual retreat, but not without competition. Ram Dass was given the koan “How do you know your Buddha nature through the sound of a cricket?” Although he knew that he was not supposed to think his way to the answer, he nevertheless spent most of his time composing the perfect response. In his interview he cupped his hand to his ear in imitation of the Tibetan saint Milarepa, who is always portrayed in that pose, listening to the sounds of the universe. “Here I was a Jewish Hindu in a Catholic monastery giving a Tibetan answer to a Japanese koan,” laughed Ram Dass. “I was really just delighted with my own cuteness.”
The roshi looked at Ram Dass for a minute and then rang his bell to dismiss him. “Sixty percent!” Sasaki cried as he nodded goodbye. As someone who had always measured myself by the grades I achieved, I could appreciate the power of the Zen master’s response. I would never want to get a sixty percent!
Ram Dass did not want to either, yet he could appreciate the humor of his predicament. “It caught me perfectly in my middle-class, achievement-oriented identity,” Ram Dass told us.11 He had attacked the koan the way he had learned to figure out a multiple-choice exam, but this was not the route to freedom. Sasaki had deftly shown him where he was attached, and Ram Dass could now pass that information along to us. As I listened to him tell these kinds of stories, I could feel him tugging at my own version of this identity. Right Thought did not mean cleverness, he was saying; it meant the ability to tolerate uncertainty. Even intelligence could be an obstacle to being.
As I listened to Ram Dass that summer, I began to get a sense of what he meant by “discovering where we are attached.” Attachment was a difficult word for me, because it had a double meaning. I was alone at the time, in search of love and meaning, and anxious about my ability to be in relationships. In some sense attachment was what I was seeking. But Ram Dass was using the word in another way. Attachment, for him, was what kept him closed off, pursuing his own small-minded and habitual agenda. It was what perpetuated his unrest. Attachment was what Maharaj-ji and Sasaki Roshi were probing, trying to release Ram Dass from the tyranny of his identity.
I could see Ram Dass struggling with his attachment to getting high and to being smart, and I could understand how those attachments restricted his ability to be open. I became interested in what my attachments might be, and I began to question who I thought I was. This was an important starting place for me in my quest for insight. Insight meant discovering where I was attached and making it conscious, thereby giving me some measure of choice in the matter. This understanding opened up a feeling for another word used frequently in spiritual circles: Space. Seeing my attachments gave me a feeling of space.
Just as my thoughts were all too often running on without my conscious participation, so did my personality seem to operate mostly on autopilot. It was not exactly unconscious, because I could tune in to it at will, but it was habitual and therefore mostly unaware. It was almost as if my identity, like my thoughts, was happening just to the side of me, just outside my grasp. Following Ram Dass’s example, I began to see that a mind without obstructions meant a personality whose attachments were brought fully into awareness. Freud’s dictum to make the unconscious conscious could be more profitably rephrased as bringing what is unaware into awareness. Dehabituate the habitual attachments. Restrain the habitual impulses. Rather than being compelled to react in a certain way, this approach permitted me a sense of spaciousness within myself, a spaciousness in which I was more conscious of who I used to be and more open to who I might become.
As I got to know Ram Dass over the years, I heard him reflect often on the transformative potential of this approach. His psychologist mind was able to put language on the more mystifying events of the spiritual search. As always, his candor and humor poked holes in my own tendency to idealize or romanticize what I learned. “Through all the years of my practice,” he would say, “from psychotherapy, from psychedelics, from meditation and yoga, I have never gotten rid of a single neurosis. They are all still there. But they have gone from being huge scary monsters to delightful little schmoos. I see one coming along and I say, ‘Oh, there you are again. I remember you. Tricky little thing, aren’t you?’ ”
This insight of Ram Dass’s is pivotal. In our desire for freedom, we imagine that we have to eliminate unwanted aspects of ourselves. But the Buddha’s psychology does not support such an approach. Change happens naturally as we open to truth. The more we bring our attachments into awareness, the freer we become, not because we eliminate the attachments, but because we learn to identify more with awareness than with clinging. Using our capacity for consciousness, we can change perspective on ourselves, giving a sense of space where once there was only habit. Discipline means restraining the habitual movement of the mind, so that instead of blind impulse there can be clear comprehension.
In the quest to understand where unsatisfactoriness comes from, we are often inclined to search for causes or people to blame. Ram Dass was the first to demonstrate to me the benefits of an alternative approach. This became the cornerstone of my understanding, that the search for causes has to lead eventually back to the individual. Although traumatic and terrible things may have occurred, it is the individual’s mind that perpetuates the suffering, and this mind can be trained to change. As long as we are struggling against the feeling, hoping to eliminate it by getting high or being cured, we are still attached. We can relieve unsatisfactoriness only by sharpening our focus and changing our perspective.
Yet this was not the end of Ram Dass’s message. He also presented his own transformation in the context of his relationship with Maharaj-ji. His spiritual work was not all internal but had taken place through the intervention of another. Maharaj-ji had pulled Ram Dass into a relationship that had shattered his models for what one could expect from such encounters. He had shown him another way of being, and had let him taste it for himself. This was the more subtle of Ram Dass’s teachings. For all of his emphasis on meditation and self-examination, his own transformation had taken place in the context of a relationship with an elderly man.
Years later, as I sat with Ram Dass on his porch, he surprised me by asking questions about my former psychotherapist, Isadore From. “We both needed those relationships,” he said with a smile. It was a bit of a shock to hear him comparing my therapist to his guru; I thought he would have kept Maharaj-ji in a special category. But I knew at once what he was saying. The wise, cranky, but loving figure who could both cut through and appreciate us was a blessing, whether it came in the form of an Indian rishi or a New York psychotherapist. When it comes to going on being, the spiritual and the psychological have quite a bit of overlap.