As my meditation developed, I began to get into the swing of things. Feelings of joy or elation no longer seemed so unusual, and I became able to peer more intensely into my own mind. Out of nowhere, strange snippets of verse sometimes appeared. “Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide,” I heard emerging out of the shadows of my mind one evening, quieted by days of meditation practice. Bits of song lyrics often wafted up to chronicle my insights. Old sounds from the radio seemed to call from the distance. “It’s been a long time coming,” I remember hearing early one morning while on retreat, “It’s going to be a long time gone.”
My understanding of what I was doing in meditation began to undergo a subtle but important shift. At first I imagined that I was engaged in something akin to a battle, an ever-deepening, ever-opening confrontation with the way things are. Obstacles to peace of mind were everywhere, from the chattering of my thinking to the intensity of my emotions to the rustling of the person next to me. I thought at first that I had to conquer them all. But as I began to appreciate how small a chance I had of winning such a battle (reality was bigger than I was), I shifted my approach. Confrontation was too confrontational; I needed something more akin to engagement: a deepening appreciation of reality, a co-mingling with it, a dissolving into, perhaps even a oneness with, this fabric of life such that the world began to appear, not as an obstacle, but as a vast tapestry of which I was but a single stitch. As I explored that tapestry, it began to seem increasingly ephemeral, making the words of the Diamond Sutra come alive in a new way. The world, says this sutra, is but “a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.” The closer I looked at things, the less solid they appeared. The fabric of life had great tenacity, but it could also seem very sheer.
In the classical psychology of Buddhism, the dawning of insight is said to be a terrifying time. In the place of a relatively secure world-view, everything suddenly looks shattered. The catalyst for this is the sudden realization that the mind’s experience is self-perpetuating. By this I mean that it unfolds all by itself, without anyone behind it. Joseph Goldstein used to repeat the phrase “Empty phenomena rolling on,” to connote this sense of ongoing anonymity. It is a difficult point to get across, until it jumps up and hits you over the head. Usually we are so identified with thoughts, feelings, and experiences that it would never occur to us to see things differently. But it is an unmistakable consequence of mindfulness meditation that we start to notice that we are no longer necessary. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions all arise of their own accord. It is quite possible to notice them without identifying with their content, which is a strange and awesome experience, akin to watching waves pounding against the shore in anticipation of a big storm. They just keep on coming. The original Pali word for a Buddhist monk, bhikkhu, means “fear seer,” one who can tolerate his own terror. At the point in meditation where the first glimpse of lack of identity is realized, this terror can become quite pronounced. In Zen Buddhism it is compared to an open-eyed man falling backward into a well.
When the powers of perception are sharpened and the mind is quieted, thoughts can be observed from their inception. Usually we notice thinking somewhere down the line of a train of associations—we catch ourselves “lost in thought.” But at certain times in meditation we can observe a thought just as it is forming, just as it is bursting into consciousness. This is a very strange experience at first, for it immediately begs the question “Who is thinking?” The thoughts appear to come from nowhere, and the tendency to identify oneself as the thinker of those thoughts is loosened. The thoughts just come and go, artifacts of some mysterious process that we ourselves are also a part of.
In the stability of meditation, first the arising and then the passing away of these thoughts (or feelings) become more interesting than their content. The more we examine them, the more their ephemeral nature captures our attention. It can start to be something like a fireworks display. In a moment-to-moment way, we see creation and destruction, all within the theater of the mind. At a certain point, usually the time of greatest terror, the passing away takes center stage. All formations keep on literally breaking up. Like scenes in the movie Groundhog Day, the same phenomena repeat themselves. As the Buddhist texts describe it, “Like fragile pottery being smashed, like fine dust being dispersed, like sesame seeds being roasted,” the phenomena of the world keep on dissolving.
While this might sound like a bad dream, or some kind of drug-induced altered state of consciousness, in the view of Buddhist psychologists this is the true state of the world. All phenomena are constantly in upheaval; rather than being fixed entities, they are consistently coming and going. As the powers of perception are developed, this reality comes more and more into focus. According to the Visuddhimagga, the classical textbook of Buddhist psychology, this period of meditation is like standing on the bank of a river during a heavy rain while large bubbles appear on the surface of the water, only to see them pop as quickly as they appear. “Formations,” the meditator begins to realize, “break up all the time.”35 The image that is used to describe this stage of meditation is one of a sage with a burning turban; the volatile nature of reality is literally upon him.
The best metaphor that I ever found to describe this view of the nature of reality came from a fellow student at Harvard who refused to write a paper for a psychology course we were taking from Daniel Goleman, and insisted instead on building a model of consciousness. My friend, Michael Feldman, whom I had long considered to be a brilliant but idiosyncratic thinker, created his project in a sudden burst of energy. I had no idea what he was up to and was worried about him failing the course. He found a bicycle wheel somewhere and mounted it so that it could spin freely, looking something like a sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. He then took broken pieces of mirror and attached one piece to each spoke of the wheel. When the wheel was spun fast enough, the pieces of mirror coalesced into a single unit and the spinning mirror wheel gave a perfect reflection of whatever it was facing. But if the wheel was turned just a little more slowly, the individual images could be seen flickering in a staccato-like manner, as if rapidly blinking on and off. It was the perfect three-dimensional representation of the moment-to-moment nature of consciousness, showing how the same mechanism could give both a unified and a fractured view of reality.
In Buddhist meditation there comes a time when the mind is able to tolerate a direct peek at reality. Rather than operating under the influence of ignorance, mistaking the image in the mirror for truth, the mind is able to see through the mirror’s reflection, into the substrate of arising and passing away. What once had seemed so solid, comforting, and desirable now appears as nothing but trouble. Wherever a meditator turns, he finds only more dissolution. Death is everywhere. There is a description of this in the Visuddhimagga that I have always loved, because of its imagery of no escape. The dawning of insight, it is said, means that the world is experienced “in the form of a great terror,” the way “lions, tigers, leopards, bears, hyenas, spirits, ogres, fierce bulls, savage dogs, rut-maddened wild elephants, hideous venomous serpents, thunderbolts, charnel grounds, battlefields, flaming coal pits, etc., appear to a timid man who wants to live in peace.”36 If nothing is lasting or stable then all is insubstantial. This is what is meant by the word “groundlessness,” which is often used to describe the Buddha’s insight. Out of this vision of groundlessness comes not resignation but a kind of benevolent acceptance, a profound equanimity that understands and accepts the essential instability of all things.
One of the consequences is that our perception of death changes. If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. When things are perceived to be flickering rather than static, we no longer fear their demise in quite the same way. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.
There is a tale in the classical tradition of Buddhism about a group of thirty monks who, upon receiving meditation instruction from the Buddha, went into retreat during the rainy season in a remote forest dwelling. Enthusiastic in their practice, they resolved to meditate in isolation from each other and to stay awake throughout the three watches of the night as best they could. But unbeknownst to them a tiger roamed their forest, waiting until the early morning when one of the monks would sleepily nod off to swoop down and carry him off for supper. Fifteen monks were plucked by the tiger in this way, without one of them even having the chance to call for help. Finally the remaining bhikkhus, in a hastily arranged conference, agreed to make every effort to yell out to each other should the tiger reappear. The next monk to be seized did indeed manage to alert the others, and the remaining bhikkhus came running with sticks and torches. The tiger, however, dragged the young monk to a rocky promontory that was inaccessible to the men and began to eat his prize from the feet upward. They called out to him that there was nothing to be done and that now was the time to put his meditation to work. Even in death his effort went toward not being lost in reactions. Prostrate in the tiger’s mouth, the monk “suppressed his pain” and began to develop insight into the insubstantial nature of his own body and mind. His demise was another opportunity to go on being. The monk’s death poem is quoted as follows:
Virtuous was I keeping to my vows
And wise with growing insight was my mind
That had to concentration well attained.
Yet, because I slacked for just a while,
A tiger took my frame of flesh and blood,
Unto a hill and then my mind did quake.
Devour me as you please, O tiger, eat
This body of mine which is bereft of thought;
Within the thought of quiet strongly held
A blessing will my death become to me.37
This is a famous story in Buddhist countries dating from the earliest written Southeast Asian commentaries. In Tibet, whose Buddhist heritage is rooted in the earlier traditions of medieval India but which evolved its own Buddhist culture some fifteen hundred years after the Buddha, there developed a further elaboration of this story. “Don’t feed yourself to the first tiger that comes along,” they warn their yogis. Just because you understand that death is not to be feared does not mean that you should throw your life away, even to feed a hungry predator.
Yet for me, the power of the story is not just in the young monk’s ability to surrender to his fate; it is in the way it evokes the powerlessness that we all have in the face of death. We never know when it is going to swoop down and take us, nor what form it will be in. It might be cancer or diabetes or a stroke in lieu of a tiger, but the outcome will be the same. Like the young monk we may be witness to our own destruction, watching the steady progression as first one part of our body is devoured and then another. The monk’s ability to surrender to the tiger seems extreme—we want him to fight and escape—but how different is it going to be for each of us?
The first person I ever saw confront death was like the young monk in the story of the tiger. Her surrender made a lasting impression on me, not to be replicated until I stood by as my own therapist died slowly of bladder cancer many years later. When I was living in Massachusetts and going to medical school in the years after Naropa, meditating with Jack and Joseph on retreat and with Ram Dass at the McClelland’s house during the rest of the year, death swooped down and slowly took David McClelland’s wife, Mary.
Mary was the heart of my entire spiritual universe at the time. She was a Quaker, and a painter, and the one who had opened the McClelland’s home to all the young seekers back from India. She was basically presiding over a commune and making possible weekly meditations for the larger community as well. For a number of years she had been painting large, haunting, blue surrealistic canvases filled with eerie imagery of bones and fish scales and deserts and light. She hung these paintings, one by one, in her living room, where we gathered every week to sing or meditate together. They seemed to emit a distant and ethereal glow. Then one day she got stomach cancer. In the midst of the burgeoning joy of her household, she got stomach cancer. Slowly over the next several years her appetite diminished, and she began to fade away, with her blue eyes growing ever more luminous. She and David shared their bed until the end, and our weekly meditations sometimes shifted from the living room to their bedroom. What has stayed with me is the way that joy and sorrow coexisted in the house for that time. I think this was because Mary was a true bhikkhu, a true fear seer. She was not afraid of her own fear, even as death sat upon her head like a burning turban.
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, where ornate visual representations of Buddhist insights were established or elaborated, this transformation in the understanding of death is symbolized by one of fiercest deities of the Tibetan archetypical pantheon. There is a figure called Yamantaka, the death destroyer, who is said to be the form adopted by the bodhisattva of wisdom, Manjushri, to conquer Yama, the Lord of Death. Manjushri’s idea was to assume a form more frightening than death itself, capable of scaring death into submission, of showing death its ultimate unreality. Rather than allowing death to put an end to being, Manjushri’s aim was to expose the illusory nature of the fear of death. Yamantaka’s iconography was recently explained by the Buddhist scholar Robert A. F. Thurman, who carefully unpacked all of the symbolic meanings of what at first seems to be overpowering imagery. The deity is certainly awesome. With nine leering, blue-black buffalo heads, each with three eyes, and with thirty-four arms, two fire-spouting horns, a halo of flames arising from his burning hair, a headdress of skulls, and a perpetually erect phallus, Yamantaka is nothing if not a nightmare. Yet sprouting from his central head and rising toward the sky are two more heads: one a red, fanged demon face with diaphanous skin oozing blood; and the other the golden, shining, eternally youthful and handsome Manjushri, the bodhisattva of transcendent wisdom, an oasis of understanding in the midst of death’s horror.
The story of Yamantaka is that Manjushri decided to tame death by assuming this intimidating form and simultaneously creating a huge mirror that magnified and reflected death’s horrible appearance back to him, using death’s own face to frighten and subdue him. This is consistent with the most basic Buddhist meditative approach: To stare something straight in the face is the best way to bring it under control. As Thurman put it, Manjushri trapped death “in the endless terror of eventually being killed himself.” Manjushri caught death in the habit of imagining things to have an inherent and fixed reality, turned that thought habit back on him, and then used the resultant fear to bring him into submission. After paralyzing death in this way, the bodhisattva showed him the way out of his terror, revealing to the demon the transparency and interconnectedness of life, dissolving “the absolute severance death is imagined to be.”38
Mary’s death was as powerful for me as a vision of Yamantaka. Like golden Manjushri peeking out of the horrible form of the death destroyer, Mary’s love burned all the brighter as she dissolved. Her death made an indelible impression on me, all the more so because it came at the time of completion of my medical education, just as I was to begin caring for sick and dying patients in a hospital in the Boston area.
As a psychiatrist in training, I was expected to do a one-year medical internship. I chose a program in a chronic care facility where there were wards of people who were not expected to recover from their illnesses. There was also a functioning intensive care unit and a locked prison ward serving the state’s incarcerated population. It was a backwater hospital, for patients whom the medical establishment had little interest in, but it was also a place where friends of mine were establishing a short-lived “pain and stress” clinic with a natural foods kitchen and acupuncture in the outpatient clinic. The hospital was happy to have me: I was a doctor who spoke English and had gone to an American medical school, a rarity in that environment. The fact that I wanted to be a psychiatrist was not a liability.
My patients were not like Mary. I remember the first two people I ever cared for, both lying in their hospital beds suffering from illnesses that we could do nothing about. Mr. Fishman, a round and once overweight Jewish grocer, was gradually suffocating from emphysema, in which his lungs, made brittle from years of smoking, could no longer expand and contract to allow a flow of oxygen into his blood. He would gasp and call out to me, “Dr. Epstein, Dr. Epstein,” whenever I was near, with the unquenched neediness of a hungry child. He was scared, and there was not much I could do for him. Mr. Houlihan, an alcoholic Irish shipyard worker, was shriveling up from chronic cirrhosis. His liver was shutting down and was unable to clear his blood of impurities. His skin and eyes were yellowing, he itched unrelievedly, and his belly was swollen with ascites, fluid that could no longer pass through the liver. He was withdrawn, turned over in his bed away from visitors and turned into himself, hardly looking up at his grown daughter who sometimes attended his bedside.
With both people I eventually adopted the strategy of just sitting with them for a bit every day. There was not really room for this in my schedule, but I would try to find time. Luckily my internship was not as frantic as most. I would think of Mary, or of the Diamond Sutra, or of the vision that death is happening all the time, to each of us; that it is not an unnatural thing. I would remember the terror of dissolution in meditation and the equanimity that came from not fighting it. I could not talk about any of this to my patients—I am sure it would not have been well received if I had—but I could stop and hang out just a bit. This was not the usual modus operandi on the hospital floor.
In some ways I could see myself in both Mr. Fishman and Mr. Houlihan. When the Buddha taught, in his Second Noble Truth, that the cause of suffering was “thirst” or “craving,” he suggested that this thirst was of three types: the craving for sensory pleasures, the craving for being, and the craving for nonbeing. Craving for being meant the desire for more of what one already has. If only my wife could be more loving, if only the sunset could last longer, if only my best friend still lived around the corner. If only I felt as real as I was supposed to. Craving for nonbeing meant seeking oblivion, nothingness, the peace of deepest sleep, the hope that a problem could be eliminated altogether or that there was somewhere to escape to. One recent patient of mine described it as a craving for amputation, the wish that an obstacle could be cut off and thrown away or that the self could shrink down to nothing, withdrawing as far as possible into a cocoon of invisibility.
Mr. Fishman and Mr. Houlihan seemed to embody these two cravings. In their symptoms they were expressing a deeper pattern of behavior that ran through the texture of their lives. In his gasping after the next breath, Mr. Fishman was grasping for more of what he already had—oxygen—but in his anxiety he was using up that which was so precious to him. He would become increasingly short of breath the more he struggled. Mr. Houlihan was seeking the oblivion that he thought death could be, much as he had sought it through alcohol in his drinking days. He was not open to the life that remained for him, embodied in the presence of his daughter at his side.
In sitting quietly with each of these men, I did not do therapy, nor did I meditate. I simply sat with them, aware of the continuity of their going on being. They were so caught up in their dying that they were no longer very available. I attempted to use my presence to give them something to focus on, without feeling sorry for them and without pushing them away. I wanted them to know themselves as spirit, as something more than their ailing minds and bodies. I do not have any real way of knowing how successful I was at communicating any of this, but I do know that they both liked me. Mr. Fishman calmed down a bit, and Mr. Houlihan opened up a little. There were moments when I felt that each was a bit less afraid, when my awareness touched the place in them that was beyond craving. Although I did not know it at the time, I can see now that these men were among my earliest teachers in psychotherapy. With each of them, unable to help them in more conventional ways, I had to become a fear seer.
The danger of this particular stance, or at least of my expression of it, is that it can sometimes be too cool, too much observation without enough participation. This is why, in the Buddhist view, insight without compassion is thought to be heartless. To truly appreciate the ephemeral nature of things is to realize that we are all in the same boat, even though it may not be my turn to be eaten by the tiger. When my wife had our first baby, for example, I was with her throughout her labor, but she found me unhelpful in the times of most duress because of my belief that her awareness could somehow contain the pain that she was experiencing. I was attached to the notion of observing with equanimity, and this kept me apart, at times, from the actual experience. When she was in labor with our second child, I threw all that away and was just there with her. I gave her my body to hold on to or to push against. I remember her screaming and pulling on the hair of my head until I thought she would pull it all out, her pain was so intense. But we had a wonderful birth, in which we were all transformed. With my first patients, before I had assumed much of a professional identity, I think I was able to be present with them without that subtle sense of distancing. As I have worked more, I have had to keep undercutting my professional stance in order not to lose the person-to-person contact that makes awareness so powerful.
Birth and death are fruitful in the manner in which they undercut the complacency of who we think we are, in the way in which they shake us up and make us question ourselves. If we let them, they can strip away the layers of identity that imprison us, exposing us to the groundlessness that is the bedrock of the Buddha’s vision. Like my early patients in the hospital, we often try to protect ourselves from the enormity of that vision, imagining it to be too terrifying to tolerate. My response to our first childbirth experience had that same protective clinging in it—I was trying to hold on to my observing stance as a bulwark against the raw terror, and excitement, of my daughter’s birth and my wife’s pain. But hearts and minds open when we can allow ourselves to be swept away by such experiences.
The Buddha consistently recommended this approach to his followers, right down to the moment of his own death. His insight meditations were always about opening the mind to the relentless flow that underlies our consensual realities. Over and over again, he encouraged his monks to tune in to the dissolution of everything that they held so dear, not to depress them but to let them love more completely, free from attachment to that which is inherently insubstantial. “Indeed bhikkhus,” he said to them, an old man on the verge of his final breath, “I declare this to you: It is in the nature of all formations to dissolve. Attain perfection through diligence.”39 The Buddha’s final words distilled his vision down to the bone, even as, in his death, he became a living embodiment of what he was preaching.
It may sound odd, but one of my greatest teachings about all of this came in the middle of a girl’s softball game that my eleven-year-old daughter was pitching. It was a pick-up game with the parents, since the opposing girls’ team had failed to show up for the scheduled event, and I was playing a shallow right field, while my daughter was on the pitcher’s mound. She was a good, consistent pitcher, lobbing the ball underhand to the opposing hitters. The third batter, one of the grown-ups, was hitting left-handed so as not to hit the ball too deep, but on his first swing he cracked the ball straight back to the mound into my daughter’s face. She bent forward, hands and glove over her cheekbones, and then reared back and screamed to the sky, her nose spouting blood like a fountain. I raced toward her, but the world had clicked into slow motion. I couldn’t reach her fast enough, and it seemed as if no one else was moving at all, like one of those episodes of The Twilight Zone where everything freezes. My daughter reminded me of the great Hindu goddess Kali, queen of destruction, whose bloody mouth and necklace of severed heads signify her role as destroyer of illusion. Her screams circled my head like a pack of vultures. When I finally reached her, I cradled her in my arms and carried her off the field. Parents and children surrounded us, and we managed to staunch the flow of blood with somebody’s shirt. I probed her face with my fingers to look for broken bones and felt a reassuring firmness to my pressure. She was quite still in my arms, weeping softly. Another parent whispered to me that her nose was probably broken. Someone fetched my car and we carried her to it, my eight-year-old son toting the bloody glove and trailing quietly behind.
The curious thing was the peace we all felt. It was an anxious peace, to be sure, but it was strangely calm. Our world had been fractured, but we were all still together, perhaps even more so. Our car felt like a boat, as we wove our way home, big and wide. My daughter was moaning that she wished she were dead, but said later she just couldn’t think of anything else to say. I got her home and placed her on the yellow couch with ice on her nose and called the pediatrician. I examined her again under the doctor’s instruction and decided that nothing seemed broken. The pediatrician told me what to watch out for but determined that we did not have to rush to the emergency room. There was not much else to do, other than wait for Mom to come home.
As in a deep meditation, the sudden perception of destruction had jolted us all into another kind of consciousness. When my wife walked into the house, my daughter took pleasure in her mother’s horrified, and loving, response. She had looked over the precipice and survived, with two black eyes and a swollen face to show for it. When both kids had to write autobiographical pieces for school the next fall, each one wrote about what had happened. “What I learned from this,” my son wrote, in a phrase that my daughter appropriated for her essay as well, “is that a softball is not soft.” Things are not what they seem, we all realized for an instant. The tiger can swoop down at any time. I did not say it to them, but to myself I repeated a somewhat different moral. The world plays hardball with us, I thought, and we are not in charge. It is the nature of formations to dissolve.
But we did not emerge from this with more fear, we came out of it with more confidence. It was not fragility that made such an impact, it was our ability to meet it. In the midst of the dissolution of things as we knew them, some sort of acceptance took hold, and it arose spontaneously. Our instinctive surrender permitted us to be totally present, come what may. There is a certain kind of confidence that precipitates out of these crises, the faith in our own capacity to face that which we most dread. I still do not know where such calm comes from, but I am more willing to believe that I have not seen the last of it.