The Buddha’s teachings about the route to happiness were very kind to someone in my position. “It doesn’t matter how well you know yourself,” he seemed to say. “What matters is how you relate to what you do know.” The Buddha’s psychology hinged on the human capacity for self-reflection, on our peculiar ability to observe and question ourselves even as we are in the midst of a strong reaction. Whether we feel like somebody or nobody, the key is not to cling. Like Winnicott, the Buddha was always trying to show the limits of self-certainty, and he once even gave a teaching in which he explicitly refused to communicate most of what he knew. Talking one day in the forest environment that he favored, he suddenly held up a handful of simsapa leaves and asked the attentive bhikkhus (or monks) to tell him which was greater, the leaves in his hand or the leaves in the surrounding grove. While I have no idea what a simsapa leaf looks like, I have no trouble envisioning the scene. I know that I would be suspicious right away, suspecting a trick, as I am when I read over my daughter’s math problems looking for how her teacher is trying to fool her.
“Very few in your hand, Lord. Many more in the grove,” they replied with unsparing simplicity and none of my taste for duplicity.
It was the same with his psychological and spiritual knowledge, responded the Buddha. Like the many leaves of the simsapa grove, his knowledge far exceeded the handful of his teachings. Out of the vastness of all possible understanding, he taught only that which in his view led to freedom. When asked why he would not reveal other facts about reality, he gave the following reply:
“Because, friends, there is no profit in them; because they are not helpful to holiness; because they do not lead from disgust to cessation and peace; because they do not lead from knowledge to wisdom and nirvana. That is why I have not revealed them.”
The Buddha’s teachings were always direct and to the point. In coming up against the world of psychotherapy, I have tried to use his words from the simsapa grove as a guide. “How much of this analytic wisdom is actually helpful?” I have wondered. “Does it lead to wisdom, cessation, and peace?” In the Buddhist view, knowledge is never envisioned as an end in itself but only as a beginning, useful as a means of getting oriented. As the Tibetan lama Kalu Rinpoche once put it, “It is said that someone who tries to meditate without a conceptual understanding of what he or she is doing is like a blind person trying to find their way in open country: such a person can only wander about, with no idea how to choose one direction over another.”19 Self-knowledge must be focused if it is to be useful, thought the Buddha, and it must be focused in a specific way.
The challenge in being a psychotherapist was to find a way to stay attuned to the handful of leaves that the Buddha plucked from the simsapa grove while still meeting the needs of my patients. Therapy was capable of generating all kinds of insights, but they were not necessarily heading toward cessation or peace. I knew too many well-analyzed people who were just as selfish or discontent after analysis as before. They had examined their lives but were not living them any differently.
As the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud understood how the mind can both get in its own way and seek its own freedom. In this view he was very much in accordance with his Buddhist predecessors. Always respectful of mind’s dual capacity, Freud devised a number of strategies to elude the defensive and fearful ego, to trick the rational mind into relaxing its grip, attached as it can be to the status quo. Moving back and forth between hypnosis, dream analysis, free association, and transference, Freud was always searching to perfect his royal road to the unconscious and to open up the deeper layers of the mind. To me it seems as if Freud were always unconsciously searching for meditation.
Freud’s favorite metaphor for psychoanalysis was of an archaeological dig. Not only did he prefer the archaeological metaphor, he collected archaeological antiquities. His consulting room was full of them. They represented the power of the unconscious, the mysterious forces that seep up from the depths to influence our thoughts, dreams, feelings, and behavior. They were the instincts that European civilization repressed. Freud courted these forces while at the same time remaining wary of them. He believed in radical honesty but rarely romanticized what he found.
The self extends infinitely downward, or inward, he seemed to feel. The more we can pick through the obscurations of time and decay, the more clues we can find to the earlier civilizations upon which we rest. We live primarily on the surface of things, expending a good deal of psychic energy fending off the calls of the wild. But, as Freud discovered, lives can be enriched by a relaxation of these boundaries. The unconscious might be scary, but it is also tremendously fertile. As Plato famously declared, in a phrase much celebrated within psychoanalysis, an unexamined life is not worth living.
Freud was a great explorer, and like the Greek and Roman heroes whom he so admired, his discoveries were often problematic. He positioned the ego between a hostile outer world and a volcanic inner one. He tended to find knots, complexes, and stasis; unresolvable guilt feelings; and opposing forces exhausting themselves into paralysis. Sisyphus pushing his rock, Oedipus gouging out his eyes, or Ulysses tied to his ship’s mast to avoid the Sirens’ call are the kinds of characters to whom Freud could relate. Blind prophets, jealous suitors, and grown men struggling to return to the breast fill his works. He created his own mythology populated by wolf men, rat men, sadistic Prussian counts, and hysterical femme fatales. He loved offending Victorian sensibilities and felt that the best protection against tyrannical forces lay in the exposure of those urges in even the most civilized men and women.
But Freud gave ample evidence of sometimes feeling stuck. He dug down to the depths but then seemed transfixed by the objects he encountered along the way. He agonized over the unpredictability of his own death, convinced that he would die in middle age. Competitively driven, his power struggles with his followers were legendary. And his method of investigation, once so full of promise, seems by the end of his life to have disappointed him. Analysis, his agent of change, started to seem, by the time of his death, interminable.
There is a story in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia about a magical place between worlds, a kind of limbo zone, or way station, that permits access to a multitude of realms. This world of the “between” is filled with any number of pools of water. Some are large, some small; most seem, in my memory, to be vaguely dark and foreboding. In order to continue their journey, the adventurous children who find their way to this world have to jump into one of the pools without knowing where they will lead.
It seems to me that Freud discovered a route to this in-between place, but that once there he remained stuck. Dreams, jokes, free association, and transference all opened up cracks between worlds. They all led to that “between” that Freud named the unconscious. Yet Freud spent most of his time immersed in phenomena, swimming in the pool of infantile sexuality. The erotic underpinnings of the psyche so captivated him that he had trouble seeing past them.
Freud rescued sexuality from the repression of the Victorian era and understood its relation to what he once called the divine spark, but he hesitated to go beyond it. He opened up an important principle, that lower and higher make each other possible, but he opted for the compromise of the ego, rather than addressing the problems of the self. By the end of his life, he was ominously touting a “death drive” that he named for the Buddhist nirvana, a drive to destruction that balanced and contained his eros. He seemed to recognize the limitations of an exclusive focus on sexuality, but he opted for disintegration, not spirit, as the missing piece. His choice of “nirvana” as the key word is interesting. Freud would be the first to admit that there are no accidents when it comes to linguistic associations. Did he recognize, on some level, that the Buddha’s theory balanced his own? Did his instincts need nirvana as a conceptual complement? The Buddha seems to be calling from another place, one that Freud heard discussed but did not completely understand, as his own equation of nirvana with death would seem to indicate.
Nirvana is the Buddha’s word for freedom, not for death. It is his answer to the problem of common unhappiness, to the anxiety that is encapsulated most clearly in the fear of death. Nirvana, as the late San Francisco Zen master Suzuki Roshi put it, is the capacity to maintain one’s composure in the face of ceaseless change. The key, from the Buddha’s perspective, is to find nirvana through overcoming one’s own self-created obstacles to that composure. The path to nirvana means working with one’s own reactions to the change that surrounds us, to the change that we are. This is not a possibility that Freud ever entertained, although his method of cracking the world of appearances has important similarities to the Buddha’s approach.
In the Buddhist view the major obscurations to freedom are called kleshas. A difficult word to translate, kleshas have been called everything from passions to afflictions to conflicting emotions to disturbing conceptions. No one has been able to find quite the right word, for they are not solely emotion nor are they exclusively thought. Joseph Goldstein refers to them as afflictive emotions, while the British writer and translator Stephen Batchelor has taken to calling them compulsions. The basic idea is that certain powerful reactions have the capacity to take hold of us and drive our behavior. We believe in these reactions more than we believe in anything else, and they become the means by which we both hide from ourselves and attempt to cope with a world of ceaseless change and unpredictability. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance are the classic Buddhist examples, but others include conceit, skeptical doubt, and so-called “speculative” views, notions of self that bind and restrict us.
The kleshas work by grabbing hold of consciousness and taking it over. When enraged, I do not stop to question my reality; I am completely caught up in anger. There is no space in my mind; I am identified one hundred percent with my feelings. The reason that klesha is so difficult to translate is that it connotes something that underlies both state of mind and emotion. Simultaneously thought and feeling, but more basic than either, kleshas are so intense that they propel us mindlessly into actions that cause suffering. When angry, I am gripped by my anger, and I don’t care, for the moment, what the consequences of my words or actions will be. I feel totally justified. Just as the ancient languages of the Buddha have only one word for head and heart, so they also recognize the power of these primitive states to monopolize the mind, body, and behavior.
When Freud talked of instincts or drives he was trying to explain a similar concept, that there are energies that permeate us, which can grab our entire being and shape who we become. But in Buddhism these energies are not seen as essential, the way they are in conventional psychoanalysis; they are seen as self-created, springing from a fundamental fear or confusion, a reaction to things being out of our control. The great eighth-century Indian Buddhist scholar Shantideva compared the kleshas to bands of thieves lying in wait to steal the jewels inside the house of mind.20 His comparison is apt but suffers a little from self-estrangement. The bands of thieves are not separate from us. We steal from ourselves, having somehow learned how to rain on our own parades, and we are not passive victims in the matter. The trick, in Buddhist practice, is to uproot the kleshas through the insidious and invisible power of awareness. To become alert to how we restrict ourselves is to begin the process of liberation.
In Winnicott’s theory, I found an explanation for the obstacle that most bedeviled me—psychological emptiness. A puzzling phenomenon that also affected a number of the people I knew, and many of those whom I treated, this emptiness was not the Buddhist kind but something more sinister. Vague feelings of being not quite real enough, of falseness or unworthiness, coupled with a sense of yearning had made me uncomfortable for a long time. Through different methods, meditation and psychotherapy had peeled much of this away for me, but I could see, through my work as a therapist and from my conversations with my peers, that the problem was a common one. Psychological emptiness seemed to me to be a particularly virulent klesha, one that defines our time and place. Winnicott was the first person I found who addressed it comprehensively. He seemed to be pulling leaves from the same simsapa tree as the Buddha.
To me, Winnicott’s descriptions of “good enough” parenting and nonintrusive therapy were powerful evocations of what I had learned, in different language, from my meditation teachers. A child who can be lost in play with the knowledge that her parent is present but not interfering is a child who permits her ego to dissolve at the moment of good contact. This dissolution of ego is both satisfying and enriching. It feeds a sense of continuity and trust that is implicit in Winnicott’s notion of what it takes to feel real. A child without enough of that experience has gaps in her capacity to go on being, with an artificially rigid ego to show for it. Meditation and psychotherapy create special circumstances in which what was once hidden away, the child’s capacity for authentic experience, can begin to emerge. It is indeed possible to create a context in which a reactive self can become a responsive one. There is an experience of being that comes naturally when the mind’s patterns of reactivity are quieted.
When Winnicott first wrote of going on being, in a paper published in 1949, he quoted from a patient whose depressed mother had always held her extraordinarily tightly out of fear of dropping her. This patient realized that her mother’s fear had become her (the patient’s) responsibility, and she assumed this burden at the expense of her own identity. This is the classic paradigm for Winnicott, and I suspect that his “patient” may well have been a stand-in for himself. The child in such a situation develops a “caretaker” self which reacts to the needs of the parent but gets in the way of self-knowledge and self-discovery, of spontaneity and daring. In this particular vignette, the mother’s holding went from a reassuring embrace to an intrusion and a responsibility. The parallel to the Buddhist notion of clinging as the fundamental source of unhappiness is difficult to avoid. The mother held on out of fear and transferred that fear to her child, along with an impossible demand that her child take care of that fear for her. Instead of being free to have her own experience, the child’s awareness was held hostage to her mother’s need. The result was the creation of a “false self” that feels empty. It is the ultimate klesha—a compulsion, or a thief, that steals away the jewel of the mind. For Winnicott, as for the Buddha, we have to learn another way.
“At the beginning,” says Winnicott’s patient (sounding, as I have noted, suspiciously like Winnicott himself), “the individual is like a bubble. If the pressure from outside actively adapts to the pressure within, then the bubble is the significant thing, that is to say the infant’s self. If, however, the environmental pressure is greater or less than the pressure within the bubble, then it is not the bubble that is important but the environment. The bubble adapts to the outside pressure.”21 The mother’s devotion is what allows her to adapt to her baby, so that the baby does not have to adapt too much to the mother. Therapy, in Winnicott’s view, is a way of equalizing this pressure, of allowing people who had been too impinged upon, or too ignored, to breathe a little more air into their bubbles.
Meditation, too, is a means of equalizing pressure. The training of awareness is also a retraining of the ego. Instead of reacting, as it was taught to do in response to the needs of the parents, the ego can learn to relax. Rather than dwelling on the past or fending off the future, the ego can melt into the present. Both meditation and psychotherapy made me feel more alive by eroding the influence of my caretaker self. Instead of always reading the environment for signs of how I was supposed to be, I began to be myself. My psychological emptiness began to fade as I came to inhabit myself more fully. In coming to dwell in my own awareness, I became less fixated on my own unworthiness. In the midst of ceaseless change, I learned how to simply go on being.