There is an expression in horseback riding circles that one is supposed to ride with “soft eyes,” letting the world go by without focusing on any one thing too specifically. I learned about it from a patient who was having a problem doing complicated jumps with her horse, but I was interested in the broader applications of what she discovered. My patient, a young woman named Marilyn, was an accomplished rider, but, as she described it, she was “too involved” when it came to mastering a new set of hurdles. She was too focused on achievement, she told me, to permit her “soft eyes” to develop. Unable to relax into the jump, her tension and her desire for success interfered with the horse’s capacity to navigate the obstacles cleanly. Like an actor stumbling over her lines, Marilyn grew more and more unsure of herself, and her performance became more and more self-conscious.
One of her riding instructors showed Marilyn a way to distract herself from her worried anticipation. He urged her to imagine that an additional turn took place after the final leap. He gave her a method of getting her mind out of the way. This mental trick worked beautifully. Rather than becoming fixated on the jump as the culmination of her efforts, Marilyn was able to set the jump up and then move on. As she was visualizing the imaginary turn, her horse soared perfectly into the air. Because her mind was at ease, Marilyn was able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of her efforts.
As Marilyn told me her story, I realized that she had been resisting that critical moment when her self fell away, when she and the horse and the jump became one. By worrying over how well she was doing, she was perpetuating the hold of her ego, refusing to allow it to fade back into transparency. Her ambition had been interfering with her success. Her riding instructor’s efforts to show Marilyn her “soft eyes” were attempts to bring forward her capacity for unintegration, to allow her to surrender into the connection with her horse that the jump demanded. What was interesting was that Marilyn needed a trick to make this natural thing happen. Telling her to have “soft eyes” was not enough; she needed something to do with her mind to get it out of the way. This is the function of meditation practice: It provides a method of getting the mind out of the way so that we can be at one with our experience.
While I have never been much of a horseback rider, I could relate to Marilyn’s predicament, and to her solution. When I was in elementary school, I developed something of a stammer, especially when I had to introduce myself or say my own name. My anticipation of having to speak, like Marilyn’s anticipation of having to jump, created such a reaction within me that I became immobilized. My parents finally took me to a speech therapist, a kindly gray-haired woman named Mrs. Stanton whose musty office I remember was up a long and dusty flight of stairs in downtown New Haven. We played board games, which I enjoyed, and while we played we would talk. She told me once about a man with a stutter who had a particularly difficult time with words that began with the letter w. He would always have trouble when he had to introduce his wife at a party. I remember laughing together, with some horror on my part, over the plight of this poor gentleman, struggling to introduce his w-w-w-wife. In the midst of these games and discussions, Mrs. Stanton taught me how to distract myself when the stammering was imminent. By stamping my foot lightly, or touching the table in front of me, I could create enough space for the words to come. Just as Marilyn had learned how to get out of the way so that she could jump, I learned how to let go so that I could speak.
Years later, when I would get stuck in a therapy session, my therapist would urge much the same strategy. “Speak without thinking,” he would tell me. I was always surprised to find that I would say just the right thing. The lesson was similar. Speech does not always have to be thought out beforehand. We discover what we need to say when we get out of the way of ourselves.
Recently, I was sitting in my office with a young woman named Cara who began to tell me of an affair she was beginning with a married man.
“I know you won’t believe me,” she said, “but he’s a nice guy. He loves his wife. What he’s doing having an affair with me if he loves his wife, I can’t tell you, but he seems different from other married men I’ve been involved with.”
While successful in her work life, Cara could be intensely self-critical and insecure in her personal life. I had long puzzled over what had kept her from getting involved with someone she could really be with. As we talked about the married man and how he was “different,” I began to see that Cara was put at ease by how much this man cared for his wife. She had none of the usual anxiety or insecurity that accompanied discussions of other potential lovers or suitors.
“You seem to like the fact that he is so fond of his wife,” I ventured.
“I do?” she responded, surprised. “Why do you say that?”
“You’re not obsessing over whether he likes you or not,” I pointed out.
In her own way, Cara had stumbled upon the trick of Marilyn’s riding instructor and my speech therapist. She had found a way to relax her obsessing mind so that she could start to feel what it was like to be with someone without being overwhelmed by her own anxiety. In fact, what she confided to me about her last rendezvous was that the part she had enjoyed the most was coming home from work and getting herself ready to meet him. The anticipation was actually exciting. She enjoyed the preparations without turning them into an orgy of insecurity.
As is often the case in psychotherapy, symptoms contain a hint of their cure. It would have been all too easy to see Cara’s affair as simply another example of her attraction to unavailable men, and to leave it at that. Yet for Cara, the issue was much more about how she repeatedly made herself unapproachable by wondering obsessively whether a boyfriend liked her or not. Only by distracting herself from these thoughts could she learn what it meant to make herself available to someone. Only then could she discover, as Marilyn had, that it was possible to enjoy those moments of connection in which the day-to-day self drops away. In times such as this, we need to learn how to immobilize our reactive and anticipatory minds so that we can make the connections we are seeking.
In Buddhism, there is a similar understanding and a very specific approach to bringing about these kinds of connections. If we feel empty, taught the Buddha, we must not let that emptiness paralyze us. If we are reaching for intimacy, we must let ourselves get out of the way. If we want peace, we must first learn how to quiet our own minds. If we want release, we must learn how to cease our own craving.
There is a famous story about one of the Buddha’s early followers, the bandit Angulimala, that drives home the Buddha’s most fundamental teaching. One of the most feared criminals of the Buddha’s time, Angulimala distinguished himself by his habit of garlanding himself with the severed fingers of his murdered victims. When word got out that he and his band were in a certain area of the countryside, all who could possibly avoid travelling in that area would do so. The Buddha’s followers naturally beseeched their teacher not to make himself vulnerable to the bandit, but he obstinately refused to capitulate to their warnings and set out on the country roads that led toward the murderer’s turf. On seeing the Buddha from afar, Angulimala armed himself and began to follow the holy man. But the Buddha, through his extraordinary powers, made it impossible for Angulimala to catch up with him no matter how strenuously he was pursued. Exasperated, Angulimala paused and shouted out, “Stop, recluse! Stop!”
Although the Buddha continued to walk, he shouted back paradoxically, “I have stopped, Angulimala, you stop too.”
Puzzled, Angulimala gave his famous response: “While you are walking, you tell me you have stopped, but now, when I have stopped, you say I have not stopped. I ask you now about the meaning: How is it that you have stopped and I have not?”2
The Buddha’s intervention momentarily interrupted Angulimala. He got the murderer’s attention, looked deeply into his eyes, and explained to him that he had stopped creating suffering for himself. Elaborating his teachings to Angulimala, he converted him from one of the most feared outlaws of his time to one of his most accomplished followers.
Just as I had to learn to stop my worry rather than my speech, so did Angulimala have to learn to stop more than just his locomotion. The great problem with our minds, as with our selves, the Buddha explained, is how to stop them. We must learn to relax the grip of the thinking mind that is always, like Angulimala, assessing its next victim.
As a student of human neurosis, Freud was familiar with the mind’s tendency to interfere with its own satisfaction. In his own way he understood something of what the Buddha explained to Angulimala. In his descriptions of the obsessional character, for example, he gave great credence to the power of the mind to interrupt the flow of gratifying experience. He called this a psychological defense and gave it the name isolating. Speaking primarily in sexual terms, Freud described how the thinking mind interferes with experience and removes the possibility of successful contact. Erotic experience depends on the ego’s striving to become one with that which it desires, Freud recognized,3 but this is also a potent source of anxiety. We fear that which we most desire, the falling away of self that accompanies a powerful connection. In a moment of successful contact, as in Marilyn’s jump, my spontaneous speech, or Cara’s unself-conscious exchange with her lover, there is a brief but exuberant unity, a touching or a connection in which we forget ourselves and are enriched. Our selves are reconfigured in this process. But Freud was witness to how people restrict this capacity by holding themselves back. It is as if we have a “taboo on touching,”4 he said.
Our everyday thinking minds are obsessional in exactly this way. The thinking mind remembers itself constantly, not wanting to forget or to be forgotten. It must always have something to do. Like an ever-vigilant, overly intrusive chaperone, it interrupts any possibility of connection. As Freud described it, the thinking mind prohibits contact by “interpolating an interval”5 whenever and wherever it is possible. A patient of mine, for instance, had trouble at times reading a paragraph without saying the words “comma” or “period” to herself when she came upon these marks in her books. She felt compelled to interrupt herself at every opportunity. In a less dramatic but more far-reaching way, our endlessly repetitive thinking interferes with our ability to connect with our own world. Isolated in our heads, we yearn for the kind of connection that our own thinking guards against.
In murdering victim after victim, Angulimala was acting out this obsessional pattern of punctuation, compulsively interpolating intervals into his experience by repeatedly extinguishing life. In a less obvious way, but by using similar mechanisms, our own endless and repetitive thoughts squeeze the life out of life, vigilantly guarding against the loss of self that we fear.
One of the most profound aspects of intensive meditation practice is that it throws us up against this very phenomenon. The sheer volume of pointless thinking that is going on inside our heads becomes inescapable in the quiet of meditation. For many people, this comes as quite a shock. We are used to thinking of thinking as a good thing, as that which makes us human. It can be quite a revelation to discover that so much of our thinking appears to be boring, repetitive, and pointless while keeping us isolated and cut off from the feelings of connection that we most value. This was precisely the experience of a patient of mine, a composer named Kelly, who on her first nine-day retreat was incredulous at the sheer quantity of obsessing, worrying, and planning in her mind.
“If I had only put a fraction of the time spent worrying into my work, I would have gotten so much done in my life!” she exclaimed in our first session after the retreat.
“What was all that obsessing defending against?” I wondered.
“Engagement,” she said quickly.
“And why should engagement be frightening?” I puzzled.
“Disappointment in the actuality of the experience,” she answered, after only a brief hesitation.
Rather than risking an encounter that might not meet her expectations, Kelly held herself aloof in her mind, recoiling from an imagined disappointment. As our discussions continued, Kelly came to see that she was similarly avoiding any intimate relationship that had the least hint of ambivalence. She had no trouble concocting enormous crushes on idealized figures whom she then avoided, but the fear of disappointment prevented her from engaging with anyone for whom she could foresee ambivalent feelings. In the aftermath of her meditation experience, Kelly began to see that by quieting her own mind she could find a middle way between idealization and isolation by venturing more willingly into relationships that carried the potential for disappointment. By not “buying in” to the chatter of her own mind, Kelly learned that she did not have to be so isolated. The chatter was a form of protection from being touched, but it was a protection that had its own side effects. Kelly could take more risks and make more contact than she thought.
Psychotherapy has long been aware of the defensive nature of much of our day-to-day thinking and has striven to find ways of undermining its tenacious hold over our minds. Once Freud figured out that the purpose of so much of our thinking is to isolate us from the flow of gratifying experience, he began to see this dynamic in many of his friends and patients. Much of the liberating promise of early psychoanalysis stemmed from its attempts to cure this isolating tendency of the human mind. But scattered within Freud’s writings we find references to his frustrations in actually effecting the kinds of changes he was reaching for. He thought deeply about the reasons for the self-imposed isolation of the thinking mind but had difficulty translating his insights into a method of change. While his insights were revelatory, he did not have the method of the Buddha within his grasp.
In a short, masterful, and little discussed paper written in 1915 called “On Transience,” Freud reached for a fearless mental posture that unknowingly paralleled that of the Buddha while at the same time offering a parable about the limitations of his analytic method. Recounting a summer walk that he took through a “smiling countryside” with a “taciturn” friend and a “young but already famous poet,” Freud described how his friends were unable to smile back at the beauty that surrounded them. They could admire the sights, he observed, but they could not feel. They were locked into their own minds, unwilling or unable to surrender to the beauty surrounding them. Like Kelly on her first retreat, but without her self-awareness, they were unconsciously guarding themselves against engagement with something that might disappoint them.
“The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind,” wrote Freud at the beginning of this essay. “The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted.”6 Either we get depressed when confronted with impermanence, suggested Freud, or we devalue what we see and push it away. Just as Freud described these two possible reactions, so did the Buddha. He called them attachment and aversion, although Freud’s terms of “aching despondency” and “rebellion against the facts” would have done just as well.
Only by cultivating a mind that does neither, taught the Buddha, can transience become enlightening. This is, in fact, the heart of the Buddha’s teaching: that it is possible to cultivate a mind that neither clings nor rejects, and that in so doing we can alter the way in which we experience both time and our selves.
Like the Buddha, Freud did not want to yield to either of the two alternatives of attachment or aversion. He was seeking a third option but had trouble finding the words to describe what it could be. Like a Japanese Zen master whose full attention is focused on the sound of the crickets or the taste of a strawberry, Freud sought to return his friends to a more intimate and immediate experience of the moment. “It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it.… A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely.”7 Yet Freud’s exhortations did not move his friends. He was unable to open their senses to the beauty surrounding them. Their hearts remained closed, their minds stubbornly disconnected from their bodies, their avoidance of transience overshadowing their sights, smells, and perceptions.
Why, asked Freud, do we prevent the flow in moments such as these? Why do we hold ourselves back from contact? Why do we hold ourselves so aloof? His friends’ disengagement on their summer walk obviously had all kinds of reverberations. Would they not hold themselves back from love just as they were holding themselves back from nature?
In Freud’s discussion of his two friends’ hard-heartedness, he had the realization that they were trying to fend off an inevitable mourning. In their obsessional way, they were isolating themselves and refusing to be touched. His description is powerful because it mirrors each of our refusal to embrace the transience of all that is important to us, including our own selves. To one degree or another, we are all, like his friends, in a state of abbreviated, or interrupted, mourning. Acutely aware of our own transience, we alternate between an aching despondency and a rebellion against the facts. We cling to our loved ones, or remove ourselves from them, rather than loving them in all of their vulnerability. In so doing we distance ourselves from a grief that is an inevitable component of affection. Using our best obsessional defenses to keep this mourning at bay, we pay a price in how isolated and cut off we can feel.
There is a well-known Buddhist story: A Tibetan master’s son died suddenly from illness. Hearing him weep inconsolably, the master’s disciples came and confronted him with their surprise. “You taught us that all is illusion and that we should not be attached,” they admonished him. “Why are you weeping and wailing?”
The master answered immediately, “Indeed, all is illusion. But the loss of a child is the most painful illusion.”
The master did not attempt to inhibit his attachment or his mourning. He was able to embrace grief as wholeheartedly as beauty. By pushing away the painful aspect of experience, Freud observed, his friends were isolating themselves from their own capacity for love. As the Tibetan master’s reaction made clear, love and grieving, like separation and connection, are co-constitutive. Opening oneself to one emotion deepens the experience of the other. The heart can open in sadness as much as it does in joy.
In the Buddha’s teachings on transience, his point is that everything is always changing. When we take loved objects into our egos with the hope or expectation of having them forever, we are deluding ourselves and postponing an inevitable grief. The solution is not to deny attachment but to become less controlling in how we love. From a Buddhist perspective, it is the very tendency to protect ourselves against mourning that is the cause of the greatest dissatisfaction. As the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen wrote in his discussion of what he called “being-time,” it is possible to have a relationship to transience that is not adversarial, in which the ability to embrace the moment takes precedence over fear of its passing.
“Do not regard time as merely flying away,” he warned. “Do not think flying away is its sole function. For time to fly away there would have to be a separation (between it and things). Because you imagine that time only passes, you do not learn the truth.…”8 What Dogen was saying was that we are not actually separate from time. When we distance ourselves and recoil from time’s passing, we are creating an artificial duality. Our being and time are not separate, they are one and the same. They are all we have.
Much of our endless and repetitive thinking is functioning to distance us from this realization. Isolated in our own heads, we avoid the window into impermanence that intimate connection provides. The Buddha observed that the mind has the tendency to cling or to recoil in such circumstances but the capacity to do neither. Meditation is a way of learning how to permit the temporary intermingling that makes an intimate connection possible. Freud understood how necessary this intermingling could be but had trouble finding a way to make it accessible for his friends. Buddha devoted his forty years of teaching to showing how the practice of meditation could open up this capacity for anyone.
In Buddhism, breaking through the thinking mind’s isolation requires something other than just analysis. It requires a new way of being with the mind, one in which its observing functions take precedence over its reactive ones. It is a way of resurrecting that benign silence of the mother who can watch without interfering in her child’s play. The Buddha taught how to use meditation as a vehicle for putting worry and self-consciousness on hold, just as Mrs. Stanton taught me to distract myself from my anxiety. Substituting a more benign caretaker, a watcher or observer, for the split-off mental functioning of the obsessively thinking mind, meditation tricks the self the way Marilyn’s instructor tricked her into allowing her horse to jump.
Viewed in this manner, there is something homeopathic about the Buddha’s medicine of meditation. It takes a little bit of the symptom and uses it to cure the bigger problem. As I became more and more familiar with the core meditative strategy of moment-to-moment awareness that runs like a thread through the different kinds of Buddhism, I was struck by the many obsessive features that this practice has. This technique, which goes by the name of mindfulness or bare attention, requires the careful noting of everything that occurs in the mind-body spectrum as it unfolds. The meditator is taught, for example, to distinguish the lifting, moving, and placing motions of the foot as she walks, or the chewing, tasting, and swallowing sensations as she eats. Emotional reactions of liking or disliking are not repressed, but are carefully noted as responses that are distinguishable from the core events. Successful practice requires both distancing—in the setting up of a “watcher”—and interruption of the flow of experience—through the noting of its component parts.
When I learned to practice mindfulness, I was taught to keep up a running commentary on my own process in the form of an ongoing labelling: “Lifting the arm, grasping the fork, moving it toward the mouth, opening the mouth, hungry, hungry, smelling the food, remembering the last time I had this, hoping it’s good, feeling the warmth of the food, too hot, tasting the food, disappointment, disappointment, hearing a noise, chewing, chewing, feeling saliva, swallowing, wanting more.” In a retreat, this kind of self-observation continues throughout very long days. As I learned to separate my emotional reactions from my sensory experience, my mind began to settle down. It became, not unresponsive, but much less reactive. Similar in tone to a mother who can be simultaneously holding but not intrusive, this noting mind gently coaxed me toward an experience of how transient everything is. This witnessing is the most common beginning strategy in meditation: It permits a subtle alternative to the obsessive distancing that Freud described so beautifully in his friends.
The interesting thing about meditation is how disposable it is. It has no need to outlive its own usefulness and is ultimately expendable. In the progress of meditation, for example, as detailed in any number of Buddhist psychological texts, the witness is always eventually dropped. The sense of duality that Dogen targeted in his discussions of “being-time” falls away. Many a meditator labors for long periods before listening carefully to the voice of her teacher, yet the message is always the same. The ego, be it the thinking mind or even the observing self, is eventually quieted, releasing us into a profound connection.
One of my favorite stories, from the early days of Zen Buddhism in China, gives the same message. An accomplished meditator, a monk named Ma-tsu, was sitting diligently at his monastery in a long retreat. His master went to him one day and asked him, “Virtuous one, for what purpose are you sitting in meditation?”
“I wish to become a Buddha,” answered the monk.
Upon hearing this answer the master picked up a loose tile and began rubbing it on a stone in front of the monastery.
“What are you doing?” asked the monk with alarm.
“I am polishing this tile to make a mirror,” answered the master.
“How can you make a mirror by polishing a tile?” exclaimed Ma-tsu.
“And how can you make a Buddha by practicing zazen (meditation)?” returned the master.9
As the story makes clear, meditation involves a kind of coopting of the obsessive mind, replacing it with an ever-more-subtle version of itself that must eventually be surrendered completely, releasing the meditator into the terror and delight of pure expression. The monk, while a sincere and diligent meditator, was still engaged in the obsessive act of polishing. His master, with the clarity of vision that is always attributed to the realized beings of these stories, could see that the witnessing had done its work. His student was ready to drop the caretaking function of the observer altogether.
The beauty of meditation practice is that it provides a continuous and ever-deepening method of closing in on the isolating tendency of the thinking mind. “The old ego dies hard,” observed the playwright Samuel Beckett, “such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security.”10 In replacing one agent of security with another less obtrusive one, meditation empowers the observing mind while relieving some of the ego’s enforced dullness. At a certain point, the meditator, ready for a true embrace, takes what one Zen master called the “backward step” and jettisons the observer altogether.
This progression, from isolation and distancing to intimacy and connection, is one that characterizes the Buddhist path in all of its manifestations. The practice of meditation, through its empowering of the observing mind and its refusal to adhere to the two alternatives of attachment and aversion, is the crucial link between the two. It is a practice that permits a method of being in harmony with the transience of the world without succumbing to its oppressiveness.
I had a very personal reminder of this not so long ago when my wife and I ran into the rabbi who had performed our wedding ceremony fourteen years earlier. We had sought out this rabbi because of his interest in Jewish mystical teachings and his sympathy toward Buddhism. He had performed a lovely ceremony which had culminated in the traditional breaking of a wine glass underfoot. As he introduced this part of the ritual, the rabbi spoke of how stomping on the glass symbolized the stamping out of emptiness and the filling of life with love.
“Stamping out emptiness?” my Buddhist friends kidded me after the ceremony. “How do we do that?”
When I ran into this rabbi at a friend’s art opening many years later, he related how he had become more and more interested in Buddhism in the intervening years. First he had started to meditate, he told me, feeling that it might help him to relax or to become less tense and neurotic. “Instead, it blew me apart,” he acknowledged. Intrigued and puzzled, he began to pursue a more rigorous study of Buddhism.
I related to him how my Buddhist friends had remarked on his attempts to stamp out emptiness and asked him if his ideas had changed at all. “Now when I do a wedding,” he said, smiling a little sheepishly, “I don’t talk about smashing emptiness but about embracing it.” Breaking the glass, for my rabbi, had come to mean accepting the transitory nature of all things. Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy. Even in a wedding ceremony that is a celebration of union, there is an undercurrent of mourning over impermanence. Revelling in intimacy means simultaneously appreciating its fleetingness. This is one of the reasons why we shy away from intimacy—it tends to put us in touch with our own vulnerability.
In Freud’s walk through the countryside the issue was also about appreciating the connection between beauty and fragility. The psychoanalyst in Freud was able to understand why his friends would not relax their vigilance, but he was powerless to get them to stop. He did not have the ability that the Buddha demonstrated in his exchange with the murderer Angulimala, nor did he have the confidence that it was possible to break through the obsessive distancing that his friends personified. Most of us exist in a state similar to that of Freud’s friends. Our minds are running on without us, keeping us at a distance from that which we love, or from love itself. We justifiably complain of feeling unreal because we are busy keeping ourselves at arm’s length from the biggest reality of all—the transience of which we are a part. Rather than permitting a flow, we impose an interruption that interferes with satisfaction or fulfillment. As my rabbi discovered, successfully permitting an intimate connection requires the ability to embrace impermanence. The flower that blooms for only a single night is indeed a sight to behold.