When I was first learning about Buddhist meditation I remember becoming inescapably aware of how much tension I was carrying in my shoulders. I had not yet turned twenty-one and had gone to Boulder, Colorado, for a kind of spiritual summer camp organized by a young Tibetan Buddhist lama, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Trungpa had fled his native country, been educated in England, and attracted a number of followers in the United States. A graduate student friend of mine had told me about the summer program, and I was impressed with how many of my cultural heroes were teaching there: John Cage, Gregory Bateson, Ram Dass, and Allen Ginsberg were among the faculty, as were American Buddhist teachers Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg.
There were thousands of people in attendance that first summer of the Naropa Institute. At one point I was sitting on a hill overlooking a parking lot in downtown Boulder, and I saw beneath me an old Volkswagen bus with a huge Sanskrit om painted on its roof, winding its way into town. I thought I was seeing the future: the coming together of East and West.
While there were scores of eminent and accomplished teachers in Boulder that summer, many of whose offerings I eagerly sampled, my first real teachers were a pair of twins from Long Island who had been randomly assigned to be my roommates. Sons of Jewish immigrants who had set up a family fruit and vegetable business, these twins had become experts in such esoteric knowledge as herbal medicine, diet, naturopathy, massage, and Chinese philosophy. Eschewing most of the formal courses at Naropa, with a not so carefully disguised disdain for the egos of most of the faculty, they contented themselves with regular early morning drives to Denver’s wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
I was taking classes in Buddhist meditation, Chinese tai chi, sensory awareness, and contact improvisation dance while they were accumulating boxes of ripe figs, peaches, nectarines, and cherries. They watched me with amusement as I took course after course, fruitlessly struggling to release the shoulder tension that I could no longer ignore. Finally, one of the twins offered to teach me to juggle.
My breakthrough that summer came not during any formal meditation practice but from my experience of juggling. As I finally became able to keep three balls in the air, I noticed suddenly how quiet my mind had become. My everyday thoughts had vanished, and the tension in my shoulders was gone. I was momentarily undefended and curiously at peace. I wasn’t trying to relax, and I wasn’t trying not to relax. Everything was floating. I was no longer centered in my thinking mind.
I remember this experience when I try to bring what I have learned from meditation to my practice of psychotherapy. People come to me most often because they are unhappy with how cut off they feel, not because they are not separate or individuated enough. The traditional view of therapy as building up the ego simply does not do justice to what people’s needs actually are. Most of us have developed our egos enough; what we suffer from is the accumulated tension of that development. We have trouble surrendering ourselves as I was momentarily able to do while juggling. I have searched for a long time to find an acceptable psychoanalytic explanation for the healing effects of this loss of ego.
In Buddhism, of course, the cultivation of such states is key. But in psychoanalysis, while there is a long tradition of fascination with mystical states, there is an equally long tradition of reducing those states to their infantile derivatives. Most commonly in psychoanalysis, the early preverbal and preconceptual mind of the infant is idealized into a blissful state of union with the mother in which the newborn is thought to dwell. This early state of oneness is treated as a kind of Garden of Eden by the psychoanalysts, who then interpret any spiritual urge as seeking, in Freud’s words, “a restoration of limitless narcissism” and the “resurrection of infantile helplessness.”1 Was my breakthrough in juggling merely the equivalent of a good feed?
More sympathetic psychoanalysts, attempting to carve out a place for spiritual experience, adapted the orthodox view a tiny bit. These experiences are not purely regressive, they argue, they are also valuable. In evoking the outgrown mother-child bond, they function as a kind of protective talisman against fears of separateness and isolation. The psychoanalyst Ernst Kris coined the phrase “regression in service of the ego” to explain this view.
According to his argument, spiritual experiences have the potential to open a window into the past, to enable one to reexamine and reexperience unresolved conflicts while working with them in a new arena. In this view, my mastery of juggling might have helped me gain confidence in my ability to take care of myself, an ability that I had not properly integrated in my childhood. The “adaptive” nature of my regression could be differentiated from a more “pathological” regression by virtue of its transitory, reversible nature and its ability to increase my self-esteem.2
Most of the more humanistic psychologists who had found their way to Naropa that summer would, of course, have nothing to do with such old-fashioned formulations. My discovery was a transcendent one, they would argue, taking me to a level “beyond” the ego, to a stage of development more evolved than the everyday mind. Perhaps I had had what the psychologist Abraham Maslow had called a “peak experience,” or maybe I had peeked in at a state of consciousness more evolved than our ordinary “suboptimal” one. On the path of personal growth, perhaps I was progressing from a hierarchy of basic ego needs to a higher level where spiritual concerns predominate.
The transcendent should not be confused with the regressive, argued the writer Ken Wilber, the premier theoretician of the New Age. Wilber described what he called the “pre/trans fallacy,” the tendency of both psychologists and spiritual practitioners to mix up and confuse infantile (pre-egoic) and transcendent (post-egoic) levels of development. Assuming that mystical states are nothing but regressions is as wrong as assuming that early childhood experiences can never be reconfigured in spiritual states, wrote Wilber. The pre/trans fallacy is a “mixture of pre-egoic fantasy with trans-egoic vision, of preconceptual feelings with transconceptual insight, of prepersonal desires with transpersonal growth, of pre-egoic whoopee with trans-egoic liberation.…”3
Wilber’s contributions seemed to satisfy many people because he answered the sometimes vexing question of what we need the ego for. “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody,” people began to say. Life is a journey, a path, a series of stages or steps or levels of development. The ego must be formed before it can be dismantled; the self must be consolidated before it can be transcended. Perhaps my breakthrough signalled the threshold of a new level of consciousness, the first strike against the ego.
While Wilber’s insights were appealing to me, I nevertheless harbored doubts about them. My study of Buddhism did not support a linear line of development. Meditation was about bringing awareness to everyday life, not about escaping it. The self was never real, taught the Buddha. The task of meditation is to discover what has always been true about the nature of self, its fundamental unreality. In the words of the Dalai Lama that came to haunt me, “This seemingly solid, concrete, independent, self-instituting ‘I’ under its own power that appears actually does not exist at all.”4 The sense of self only seems solid, he says. It “appears” to us as “concrete, independent,” self-created, and “under its own power,” but this is, in fact, an illusion.
The true nature of self is something else entirely. Meditation is meant to open a window into this something else; it is not meant to eradicate a previously existent ego. Somebody and nobody are interdependent: They feed off of each other rather than succeeding one another.
There is a well-known poem by Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” that a patient of mine quoted to me one day, which gives a sense of what the Dalai Lama means by the nonexistence of the self that appears. The poem contains the following verse:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.5
When we speak of the self from the perspective of Western psychology, we are most often taken with the beauty of inflection, with the self’s whistle as it appears. But when we look at the self from the perspective of the Buddhist psychologies, we emphasize the beauty of the self’s innuendo, of the space around the self.
So perhaps my juggling breakthrough was the equivalent of hearing the blackbird’s whistle “just after.” I did not need to leave my ego behind, merely to see around its edges. My shoulder tension and my reliance on my thinking mind were symptoms of a defensive reliance on only one aspect of my nature: a holding on to the self “as it appears.” While I was juggling, as sometimes happens in meditation, my perspective had been broadened. I had permitted a loosening that was neither transcendent nor regressive but that had allowed me to see in three dimensions instead of in two. I had glimpsed my ego’s inherent unreality, or rather, I had permitted myself to simply be, without worrying about keeping myself together.
“In thinking of the psychology of mysticism,” D. W. Winnicott wrote, “it is usual to concentrate on the understanding of the mystic’s withdrawal into a personal inner world.… Perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the mystic’s retreat to a position in which he can communicate secretly with subjective … phenomena, the loss of contact with the world of shared reality being counterbalanced by a gain in terms of feeling real.”6
When Winnicott wrote of communicating secretly with subjective phenomena, he was alluding to a mode of being that he described over and over again in his work. Contrasting such a state to one of either ego integration or disintegration, Winnicott wrote instead of the experiences of unintegration or letting go. By unintegrated Winnicott meant something like what I had stumbled upon in my juggling where the usual need for control is suspended and where the self can unwind. He meant losing oneself without feeling lost, hearing the self’s innuendo rather than just its inflection. “The opposite of integration would seem to be disintegration,” commented Winnicott. “That is only partly true. The opposite, initially, requires a word like unintegration. Relaxation for an infant means not feeling a need to integrate, the mother’s ego-supportive function being taken for granted.”7
It is the mother’s function, in Winnicott’s view, to create an environment for her baby in which it is safe to be nobody, because it is only out of such a place that the infant can begin to find herself. “It is not so much a question of giving the baby satisfaction,” he wrote, “as of letting the baby find and come to terms with the object (breast, bottle, milk, etc.).”8 As in the Wallace Stevens poem about the blackbird, the mother must do more than just satisfy the baby’s basic needs; she must also create a space in which the infant can discover herself.
The mother is responsible for background as well as foreground, Winnicott implied. She must let the baby find the object, not just provide it immediately. When this space is offered to a child, it develops into the capacity for unrestricted, unimpaired awareness that becomes the foundation for looking in to the self in later years. By accessing this ability we are able to feel our way into our selves just as the infant learns to explore her early environment.
A friend of mine made his own version of this discovery once when he spoke to me of his difficulties in relating to his ten-month-old daughter. He had trouble, he said, finding “the right voice” to talk to her in. He could talk baby talk, read to her, play games, and give her direction, but he worried that he sounded fake, like his own mother, when he talked to her. I suggested that he try being silent with her, that he was worrying too much about how he talked to her. There are other types of communication besides verbal, I reminded him.
A parent needs to discover how to hold a child not just physically but in silence. In fostering a state of unintegration by being present but not interfering, a parent creates a holding environment that nourishes a child. In so doing she sustains and encourages her child’s psychic life, in a way that my friend instinctively knew that he was not doing. When my friend experienced a sense of falseness with his daughter, he was aware of the artificial nature of his interaction. On some level, he knew that he was not giving her the chance to relax. She had to remain on guard, mobilized to respond to her father’s anxiety. She could not float away into her own experience. My friend was setting up a situation in which his daughter would have to stay too attentive to him and too afraid of the depths of her own self.
The capacity to be alone is a paradox since it can only be developed with someone else in the room. Once it is developed, the child trusts that she will not be intruded upon and permits herself a secret communication with private and personal phenomena. The best adult model that Winnicott could find for this is what he called “after intercourse,” when each person is content to be alone but is not withdrawn.9 This is a very unusual state because of how little anxiety exists. There are no questions about the other person’s availability, but there is also no need for active contact.
People are able to experience the simultaneity of closeness and separation at such times and often permit themselves a floating that they would not ordinarily. My daughter, for instance, described a method that she developed for going to sleep at night. “When I can’t sleep, I just stare at this one spot where the light comes in from the other houses through my shade,” she told me. “I look at the patterns of light and try to keep from blinking. I hear you and Mom, and I know you are there but you feel far away. Sometimes I have thoughts and sometimes I don’t, but eventually I just fall asleep.” This kind of aloneness, proposed Winnicott, is the foundation of all creativity, since it is only in such a state that it is possible to explore one’s internal world. The point is that it is not possible if one is too alone, or too intruded upon. It can only develop when the holding environment is safe and unobtrusive.
Unintegration runs like a stream through almost thirty years of Winnicott’s writings.10 Beginning with a trickle (in a paper entitled Primitive Emotional Development), almost as an aside, it gathers force and intensity and ultimately cascades into all of the major themes of his work. The healthy individual is not always integrated, declared Winnicott in an early paper. In fact, it is unhealthy to deny or to fear “the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal.”11
As unintegration became more central to Winnicott’s thinking, he began to tie it in more directly to his all-important notion of the “capacity to be.” The infant who can be, as opposed to one who can only do, has the capacity to feel real.12 In the unintegrated state, he makes discoveries about himself that affirm his sense of existing. Throughout a career that was always focused on how his patients felt unreal to themselves, Winnicott never tired of pointing out how that unreality stemmed from a parent’s inability to leave a child alone without abandoning him.
My own sense of what unintegration might mean comes from a memory of what it was not. When I was five or six years old, my parents took me for swimming lessons to a local country club that we had just joined. A lifeguard took me into the pool and walked backward, across the length of it one or two steps beyond my reach while instructing me, “Swim to me, Mark. Swim to me.” I did not know or particularly trust this fellow and had no sense (rightly or wrongly) of my parents’ presence in the background. I did not want to swim to him, did not want his arms around me, and I gasped and struggled and cried. I refused all swimming lessons thereafter and taught myself primarily by holding my breath and going long distances underwater.
It was not until I was thirty years old, at a hotel pool on my honeymoon, that I realized I never exhaled underwater while I swam. Exhalation required a trust and a capacity to let go that I had not permitted myself. More recently, while on an intensive meditation retreat, I noticed a corollary of this experience. Concentrating with relative ease on the sensations of my in and out breaths, as I had been instructed, I began to notice a panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I exhaled, before the start of the next breath. My final bit of exhalation was like a miniature unintegration: a dying into the next moment. It was not just in swimming that I was resisting this release.
Although Winnicott gave an occasional nod to spirituality or mysticism, his major emphasis was on the role of psychotherapy, play, or creativity (not necessarily in that order) in reestablishing the capacity to be. Knowing little of Buddhism, he could not appreciate how unabashedly it extols this state of unintegration. Understanding the defensive nature of most of our mental activity, the Buddha taught many methods of surrendering it. In my work as a therapist, I have adapted the Buddha’s teachings to meet the needs of my patients, many of whom have no time or interest in formal meditation practice.
A patient of mine, for example, a twenty-eight-year-old actress from Texas named Lucy, came to consult with me after a series of workshops with her voice teacher. Lucy was a very accomplished woman: confident, verbal, and engaging, but tense and rather critical of herself. Her teacher was an imposing man in his mid-fifties who ran his workshops with a combination of lighthearted ease and demanding attention to detail. Lucy’s earliest childhood memory was of hiding from her parents’ drunken fighting. She had had little of the nondemanding support that Winnicott saw as essential for the capacity to be and had instead developed the responsible and cerebral persona that often grows out of a child’s early attempts to cope with parental unhappiness. Feeling both threatened by unhappiness and responsible for it, Lucy had learned how to hold herself together to manage her parents’ moods. Now in her late twenties, she was beginning to see how her tenseness and criticalness tended to interfere with her ability to enter into her characters’ roles.
Lucy came to me because her interactions with her voice teacher were making her very uncomfortable. She felt that she was entering “the lion’s den” every time she went to see him. He was giving her exercises to do that demanded that she sing freely in front of him, and he was interrupting her every time he detected a note of falseness in her voice. She was experiencing her teacher as if he were the brutal, raging father of her youth, and she found herself becoming fearful, anxious, and angry every time she had to see him alone. Needless to say, her performances were getting worse instead of better.
Lucy came to me because she could not figure out how to relate freely to her teacher. She knew what she had to do, but she could not find a way to get past her anxiety. She alternated between being cool, composed, and cerebral, trying to “figure out” what to do, and feeling utterly dejected while crying uninterruptedly in the bathroom, imagining that her career was over. She could hold herself together or fall apart, but she could not do the third thing: She could not go into the lion’s den and relate honestly, just as I could not exhale underwater.
Lucy was experiencing a major obstacle to unintegration: anticipation of the past. She was laying the transparency of her history over the present situation just as a lecturer does with an overhead projector and a screen. Assessing the situation with her rational mind and fearing the dangers of the past, she was preventing herself from having any kind of new, and unanticipated, experience.
I explained to Lucy that in the history of Buddhism the fierce local deities of tribal or animistic cultures were always converted into protectors of the Buddhist way. Her task, as I saw it, was to ask the lion’s collaboration, to turn the internalized remnant of her abusive father into a protector of the Dharma (or truth). She could not manage, nor ignore, her projections; she had to learn to be with them. Permitting her teacher to be her brutal, raging, lionlike father, and relating to him as such, was the first step in allowing herself to go to pieces. I suggested that she had to befriend the lion. Perhaps she could bring him some milk.
My thinking in giving such advice was that Lucy’s raging father was blocking her access to her spontaneous voice. He was a big obstacle, and Lucy needed to engage him. The teacher had taken on some of her father’s qualities, and Lucy had to make use of that in order to proceed. By allowing him to be the lion, she could use her relationship to find her way around all that her father’s anger had done to her.
Lucy was afraid to stop holding herself together. She was worried that she would be flooded by terrifying feelings of abandonment, or by the immensity of her parents’ unhappiness. In some way, I believe, she was afraid that if she let herself go, she would be letting her parents go, that in keeping herself together she was protecting them or her connection to them. But the price she was paying was to be perpetually wound up. “We are poor indeed,” said Winnicott in a famous footnote, “if we are only sane.”13 For Lucy to sing meant stopping the mind that had once protected her.
Lucy’s task was to reestablish contact with her capacity for unintegration, to heal the split between her coping self and the silent center of her personality. She was reaching for an intensity and an intimacy that is lacking when the thinking mind is always trying to maintain control. Although she did not literally take my advice to leave her teacher some milk, she did gain the lion’s collaboration. By not hiding from her fear, she was able to actually engage with him. She sang her first notes in the quavering voice of a little girl and was relieved to find that her teacher did not make fun of her. As in Joseph Goldstein’s encounter with the Zen master, her teacher seemed to respond to the authenticity of her approach. He helped her to reclaim the power that she had ceded to her abusive father long ago.
Just as Lucy had to find a way to shake herself free from the defensive rigidity of her reactions to her father’s rage, so do most of us have to free ourselves from overlearned responses that become habitual and restrictive. Another patient of mine, a teacher in her own right, had a dream that seemed to open up this possibility for her. Maryanne dreamed of a musical conductor, a tweedy sort of man, who was very busy with his musical scores and with a number of people in his room.
“What I want from you,” Maryanne remembered saying in the dream, “is to turn down the noise.”
I took this as a direct message to me and told her so. Maryanne had a way of filling the space in the room with talk. Although she often complained that she was “talking too much” she felt a constant pressure to explain herself and to theorize. While she could be incredibly perceptive, she sometimes seemed overwhelmed by her own intelligence. And now here she was, wanting me to turn down the cacophony. Could the noise in her dream be the noise of her own mind, I wondered? Was she compulsively engaged in “needing to know” all of the time?
“Do you know what?” she asked. “My mother would always say to me dismissively, ‘What do you know?’ ”
As a child, Maryanne was always having to prove to her mother that she did, in fact, know something. She was never allowed, nor could she now allow herself, to have a mind that was unencumbered by knowing.
In the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism, those moments of unknowing when the mind is naturally loosed from its moorings are said to be special opportunities for realization. During orgasm, at the moment of death, or while falling asleep or ending a dream are times when the veils of knowing are spontaneously lifted and the underlying luminosity of the mind shines through. But we have a powerful resistance to experiencing this mind in all of its brilliance. We are afraid to let ourselves go all the way. To set ourselves adrift requires a trust that for most of us was lost in childhood. To Maryanne, it seemed more important to keep proving herself to her long deceased mother than it was to find some peace and quiet in her own mind. Only very gradually could she learn to turn down her own noise, and she was delighted when there were no terrible repercussions.
One of the most important tasks of adulthood is to discover, or rediscover, the ability to lose oneself To do this we must understand the difference between unintegration and disintegration. The Chinese expression for orgasm, “having a high tide,” describes this difference quite effectively. In a high tide everything is floating, the self is submerged or dissolved, there is no longer any foothold or point of reference, but it is not chaos. When we are afraid to relax the mind’s vigilance, however, we tend to equate this floating with drowning and we start to founder. In this fear, we destroy our capacity to discover ourselves in a new way. We doom ourselves to a perpetual hardening of character, which we imagine is sanity but which comes to imprison us. Our shoulders get more and more tense.
Just the other day I had a vivid experience of how conditioned my everyday mind is by this vigilance. It was early on a Saturday morning, and I had to go to our parking garage to get my car to take my son to his 10:00 A.M. soccer game. I left the house by 9:30, got to the garage at 9:40, and found that the car wouldn’t start. The attendant took out jumper cables, moved another car nearby, connected the cables, and tried to jump the battery. My lights had been left on, it turned out, and the battery needed about five minutes before it would charge enough to start up. I kept looking at my watch, congratulating myself on how balanced and in the moment I was remaining, doing one thing after the other without getting aggravated while still having the chance of making it to my son’s game in time. One thing was just flowing into the next, and my mind was at ease. I reset the electric clock in my car as I drove to pick up my family and ushered them in with time to spare.
“What took you so long?” they asked immediately.
I told them, rather proudly, and pointed to the clock to show them how we would still make it to the game.
“That’s not the time,” they said. “It’s already 10:15!”
I argued for a split second and then realized, with sudden alarm, that the car battery was not the only one to have run down. The battery in my watch was also dying. I had sailed so effortlessly through this series of events because my neurotic attachment to time had been momentarily loosened. Released from the grip of time, my caretaker self had relaxed, and my mind had risen to the occasion and attended to what needed to be done.
In a similar way in both therapy and meditation, when the tyrannical influence of the compensatory mind is temporarily lifted, a window is opened into unintegration. Then, like a child who is not afraid to be left alone, we are free to have a new experience. It is a paradox of self-discovery that we can know ourselves only by surrendering into the void.