It is no surprise to me that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition uses the passion of an intimate relationship as a metaphor for the spiritual journey since both seek to satisfy very similar longings. People look to their lovers for a feeling of connection much as they look to their spiritual pursuits for meaning in their lives. The reverberations of a mutual attraction are parallel in some ways to the discovery of the power of meditation. Both involve a momentary surrender to something greater than one’s usual self.
In my experience as a therapist I have found that the yearning for this kind of connection is one of the most common reasons for people to seek therapy. They wonder what they are doing wrong, why they cannot find happiness in their intimate lives, or why they cannot find a lover. They worry over their ability to love or be loved. There is a feeling of desperation coupled with a sense of unworthiness. People in this predicament will say things to me like, “I know I cannot love another person until I can love myself,” looking for some remedy to fix the problem. I always tell them to forget about that one, that they are thinking about connection backwards. Who are we loving when we profess to love ourselves, anyway?
The major obstacle to love, I have found, is a premature walling off of the personality that results in a falseness or inauthenticity that other people can feel. Love, after all, requires a person to be open and vulnerable, able to tolerate and enjoy the crossing of ego boundaries that occurs naturally under the spell of passion. As Joseph Goldstein found in his encounter with the Zen master, when he became vulnerable, there was a spontaneous moment of heart touching heart. When someone is so uncomfortable with his own sense of emptiness that he struggles to keep it at bay, there is no way he will be able to be open with another person. He will simply be too ashamed to reveal himself in any real manner. Therapy is effective in this kind of situation when it allows a person to discover his or her own capacity for connection. As my friend the psychoanalyst and writer Michael Eigen has written, “The hallmark of the therapeutic session is the discovery of intimacy in the face of unflinching aloneness.”1
While this kind of problem is often what brings people into therapy, it is also a common precipitant for the spiritual search and is something that the spiritual traditions address in their own way. By giving people the means of being themselves, no matter what kind of vulnerability they are bearing, meditation prepares the ground for intimacy. By teaching people how to be less self-conscious, and more accepting, of their own idiosyncrasies, meditation clears away some of the defensive rigidity that obscures the natural flow of love.
When plagued with a sense of unworthiness, it is easy to feel deficient and to see the love of another person as the only possible solution to one’s plight. Meditation tends to work against this assumption of deficiency by restoring the capacity for connection from the inside. It is like a stealth bomber that sneaks through all the defenses and illuminates the central fortress of the heart. In doing this, it challenges the common assumption of our culture about where connection comes from. In the Buddhist view, connection is already present. We are not as separate and distinct as we think we are. Connection is our natural state; we just have to learn to permit it.
One of the first people to make me aware of this peculiar truth was a former Harvard University psychology professor named Richard Alpert, who was, by the mid-seventies, known by his assumed name of Ram Dass. No longer teaching within the ivy-covered walls of academia, Ram Dass was nevertheless a pivotal figure during my early years at Harvard. He had returned from a spiritual odyssey to India, was years removed from his initial excitement over the use of LSD, and was instrumental in carrying the wisdom of the East to the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War.
Straddling the fence between therapist and guru, he made himself available for privately scheduled interviews, structured much like a therapist’s, to whoever approached him for counsel. I went to see Ram Dass shortly after my brief initial flirtation with therapy in college, full of many of the same questions and feelings that had provoked my earlier attempt to seek help. I met with him in Boulder, Colorado, where I had gone to begin my explorations of Buddhism. Although my primary motivation, in my private meeting with him, was the desire for a meaningful relationship, I also secretly hoped that he would be able to help me heal my private sense of unworthiness.
As soon as I entered Ram Dass’s room, I realized that this was to be unlike any therapeutic encounter that I might have imagined. After the briefest of hellos, Ram Dass began to gaze at me unceasingly, looking straight into my eyes but at the same time looking past me. He seemed filled with love but also completely uninterested in me, or at least in who I thought I was. He did not respond to any of my smiles, nods, or grimaces, or to any of my attempts to engage or avoid him. He simply waited, gazing at me with an unnerving and unwavering intensity that I could not quite understand. I felt perplexed yet realized that there was nothing much I could do. I tried to explain what I wanted from him: some inspiration, some guidance, some help in feeling better about myself so that I could find a girlfriend. But he seemed remarkably unmoved by my words and just continued moving his head ever so slightly back and forth while occasionally making a soft sound like, “Ahhhh.”
When I had said everything I could think of, I settled into a kind of uneasy silence in which a variety of images, memories, thoughts, and anxieties floated by. Anger, self-consciousness, and shame all took turns in my mind. I had entered the realm of the Freudian unconscious. But even this did not interest Ram Dass in particular. He seemed infinitely patient and subtly encouraging, as if beckoning to me from afar.
“What was this man doing?” I wondered to myself. “How should I react?”
But no matter what I tried, Ram Dass did not budge. Finally, out of desperation and unable to think of anything else to think about, I began to return his gaze. This was suddenly very different. Finding myself in a place beyond words, I actually felt a connection with him and sensed a moment of mutual recognition. And then all of a sudden, I realized the answer to my question. Ram Dass was not doing anything, which is why my attempts to figure out what he wanted were not moving him. He was simply being. I was going through all kinds of internal gyrations, but he was simply being. Although I was mobilized to feel done to, that was not what was happening. I was being given room to be and out of that experience was discovering that we could be together.
After several minutes of this, which was actually very moving for me, Ram Dass broke the silence with a few words of his own.
“Are you in there?” he asked. “I’m in here,” he added, pointing to himself.
Then, smiling, he said in the vernacular of the day, “Far out.”
This kind of connection was a new experience for me, and one that actually answered most of what had motivated me to seek him out in the first place. I was concerned about my ability to love and would have done whatever reasonably sounding thing a therapist would have suggested I do to uncover why I could not love. But my session with Ram Dass saved me from that. In our brief time together he made a big impression, showing me that I was capable of more than I thought, that my separateness did not negate the possibility of connection, and that love sprung from the capacity to be. Seeing myself as someone “in need” began to yield to an entirely different experience, one in which my capacity for plenitude revealed itself.
In making himself available to me, Ram Dass simply drew me out beyond my own self-consciousness to a place where I was still separate but was also connected. My defensive self dropped away, and I was left in unknown territory, where all of my ideas about myself were open to question. The connection that I was seeking was already here. I did not need to seek it outside of myself as much as I needed to open to my own ability to just be. I departed feeling restored, with Ram Dass encouraging me to remember that this capacity was available to me in my regular life. In his own way, he was revealing an essential and paradoxical truth: Separation and connectedness exist simultaneously and make each other possible. At the same time that I was in here and he was over there, we were also at one.
There was nothing in Ram Dass’s method that would have been shocking to an experienced psychotherapist, except perhaps the intensity of his gaze. In my brief encounter with him, I ran through, in abbreviated form, much of the material of conventional psychotherapy while arriving, however briefly, at a place of connection that had seemed completely out of reach.
I became aware while sitting with him of how contracted I was in my day-to-day personality, of how eager I was to please, and of how insecure I felt about my ability to do that successfully. I could see how contracting made me feel empty, not quite real, and not whole, because, in fact, I was only being a fraction of myself. Only by letting go, on the one side, and opening, on the other, could I become more real by becoming less known to myself. Only by relaxing my mind, moving away from my usual thinking and into awareness, could I find the realm behind the id.
Ram Dass was giving me an opportunity, however briefly, to touch the ground of my being, to break a path through my self to the realm behind personal identity and the unconscious. Love did not depend on how together I felt, nor was it something that I had to do. It was the more natural state, one that I had to learn how to permit.
Buddhism has developed a variety of means of driving this lesson home, some involving the interpersonal approach that Ram Dass demonstrated for me and some involving meditation practice, which is really practice in restoring the balance between doing and being. One reason for the growing appeal of Buddhism to psychotherapists is because of its success in teaching people how to reconnect with this vital and neglected capacity of the self.
A patient of mine, a successful professional in city government in her early fifties, described her struggles with meditation at her first retreat in terms that clearly reflect this paradigm. While the meditation instructions were simply to watch her breath, Kate spent most of the first few days trying hard to regulate it. Her breathing should be relaxed, she thought. It should be deep and rhythmical. She should be able to feel every bit of it. Watching the breath became a project, and Kate attacked it with all of the gusto that she regularly applied to difficult problems at work. As she listened to the meditation instructions, however, Kate began to realize that this was not the approach that was being counselled. She saw that her striving led only to a feeling of frustration and failure, but as she tried to change her mode of relating, she began to notice a pain in her abdomen that felt like the constraint of an iron band around her waist. The pain intensified as she approached the end of each exhalation; she began to be aware of a fear as she exhaled, of something like being alone in the vastness of a great desert.
With ample time to explore the ins and outs of this phenomenon, Kate made some breakthroughs. A great caretaker in her intimate relationships, but afraid to let herself be vulnerable, Kate recognized that her approach to the breath was analogous to her approach to her lovers. As long as she could make a project out of them she was fine. But underneath this was a fear that if she was not always doing something, she would be “dropped.” If she stayed in control, she did not have to face these fears, but if she were to give it up, she would have to face the horrifying mix of her dependent feelings and her presumptions of her lover’s unreliability. She was afraid, she realized, of “falling apart completely.”
Kate was comfortable, she began to see, in the realm of manipulation, where doing and being done to are the key modes of relating. But, as the iron band in her abdomen continually reminded her, she was steeling herself against any alternative. Her breath could not be a source of comfort, nor even an object of meditation, unless she first confronted how much she feared annihilation. She needed that iron band to prevent any sudden descent into the abyss.
When we talked all this over after the retreat, Kate smiled ruefully and told me, with some shame, how her mother used to instruct her in her breathing when she was young, teaching her the “right” way to do it. Kate’s memory shows that she internalized her mother’s inability to let go, which could be seen in her own inability to relax into her breathing in meditation. This need to be in control reflected a basic lack of trust in herself that was very similar to what I had carried into my meeting with Ram Dass.
As my encounter with Ram Dass made clear to me, meditation did not have to be the only venue for Kate’s kind of breakthrough. It could also come in the context of a therapeutic relationship in which the need of the ego to maintain control is successfully relinquished. There is nothing about psychotherapy, per se, that could not foster this kind of realization, except that, for many in our culture (both therapists and patients), it is an entirely alien concept. Just as we are taught that doing is preferable to being, so are we reared to think of separateness as the key to our growth and of connection as something that is rooted in childhood.
A linear view of growth and development runs very deeply in our culture, affecting the advice we get about raising our children and the orientation of most of our mental-health professionals. It was articulated most directly by the enormously influential American child psychologist Margaret Mahler in a series of papers written in the 1960s and ’70s. The developmental task of the human infant, taught Mahler, is to successfully navigate the path of separation and individuation, two words which under Mahler’s influence were gradually merged into a single psychoanalytic mantra: separation/individuation.
Because of Mahler’s work, it became generally accepted that the infant is not yet a person. The newborn is merged with the mother, psychologists believed, and development is a sometimes back-and-forth but ultimately unidirectional journey toward greater autonomy and separateness. The human infant is born “prematurely,” concluded Mahler, whose descriptions of the stages of development came to permeate all of psychology. The baby is physically separate from the mother but psychologically joined; its task over the first three years of life is, in her famous phrase, one of “hatching.”
Only very recently have experts begun to confirm what parents who pay attention have known forever: that the individual is hatched at birth, that there is no state of original union. While the human infant is capable of profound and nourishing oneness with its mother, it is also, already, a separate being, capable of feeling alone. The separations and unions that we experience as adults are present in stripped down and intensified forms in the infant: They characterize life from beginning to end. As Michael Eigen has written in his seminal paper on the topic, “Separateness and connectedness … arise together and make each other possible.” There is no such thing as “primary fusion” or “undifferentiation”—“Pure merger and isolation are abstract terms which do not characterize living experience.”2
The belief in original merger has prevented us from appreciating how often we actually drop our ego boundaries in adult life. Whether it is in creative work, in play, while listening to music or playing sports, or in love and sex, the most invigorating aspects of our lives involve the ego’s remarkable ability to dissolve itself. Rather than indicating a regression to infantile mental life, these experiences are expressive of a hidden capacity of the psyche that is available to us in all walks of life. When Mahler made separation and individuation into the pinnacle of individual development, she made no allowance for what, in Buddhism, is thought to be the true nature of mind: its ability to shine forth in unrestricted splendor as the self relaxes its boundaries.
Psychology has been suspicious of the wisdom traditions of the world’s great religions because these traditions have preserved a capacity of the self that Western psychology has all but whited out. Relegated to the status of a “primitive undifferentiation” that is in fact a fallacy, the melting of the ego has been seen as something that only babies or crazy people do with any regularity. Rather than seeing the self as an expanding and contracting, coalescing and dissolving, separating and merging organism, Western psychology views the self as something that has to be developed or improved throughout its one-way journey toward separateness.
In expounding this view, psychotherapists have deprived us of an essential nutrient, one that the spiritual traditions of the world have struggled to keep alive and that Ram Dass managed to make me glimpse in a single meeting. The ego’s permeability is available to us in our daily lives if we can only learn to permit it; the connection that it reveals is the source of a happiness that we yearn for but feel is out of reach. Yet if we continue to see development in linear terms, as proceeding from a merged state of oneness to differentiation and autonomy, we will continue to miss the essential role of letting go in our lives.
In Buddhism, the paradigms are different from separation and individuation. Closer in many ways to the beliefs of contemporary researchers in infancy than to the ideas of nineteenth-century psychoanalysts in its approach to separation and connection, Buddhism rejects the notion of primary fusion in which the infant is merged with the mother. “At birth I was born alone, and at death too I shall die alone,” asserted the eighth-century Indian Buddhist scholar and saint Shantideva.3 The individual is present from the start, asserted Buddha: already separate, playing out and creating her own individual stream of karma (the Sanskrit word for conditioning or cause and effect). When asked once by one of his Western students puzzling over Buddhist teachings of egolessness, “Well then, if there is no self, what is it that reincarnates?” the Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa laughed and answered without hesitation.
“Neurosis,” he replied.
The Freudian unconscious, which in the Buddhist cosmology of the Wheel of Life is epitomized by core psychological tendencies of greed, hatred, and ignorance, is seen as the driving force of the individual’s separateness. But this unconscious mix of blind and self-centered passions and aspirations is not seen as uniquely unconscious in Buddhism. It is, in fact, quite often all too conscious.
Separateness, independence, and clear boundaries are not glorified in Buddhism the way they are in our culture. They are seen instead as potent sources of suffering, as illusions that perpetuate destructive emotions like hatred, jealousy, and conceit. As a corollary of this, female attributes are not demonized in Buddhism. Because of the widespread Western belief in the merger of mother and infant, the feminine in our culture cannot escape identification with a dark and overwhelming force that seeks to engulf, swallow, or overcome the masculine properties of separation, reason, and autonomy that Western culture has come to pride itself on. In Buddhism, the feminine principle is not so restricted. It is free to take on another meaning, to assume another role. In the traditional Buddhist images of sexual relations that are used to describe the glory of enlightenment, the male principle embodies the compassionate action of doing while the female connotes primordial wisdom of emptiness, the very ground of being.
This is a very different view of the human personality than the one we grow up with. Rather than seeing ego development as all-important, as Mahler proposed, Buddhism sees the ego as a kind of necessary fiction. We need an ego to function in the world, to carry out tasks, to get us to work on time, to do the laundry, and to master new information. But we have a tendency to overvalue its reality, obscuring a more expansive view of the kinds of connection of which we are capable. In Buddhism, we must surrender the ego so that we can feel our connection to the universe. We do not move toward greater separation and individuation in this view; we move toward love and death.
There is a bar in my neighborhood that is known for its unique bathrooms that serves as a good metaphor for this alternative view of the ego. The bathrooms have a special quality that people speak about in almost reverential tones. They are up a flight of stairs and seem to have the second story all to themselves. They are large and modern, made of steel, chrome, glass, and European porcelain. But their distinguishing characteristics are their doors, which are made entirely of glass and are transparent. Only when people go into the bathroom and close the door behind them does the glass become opaque, shielding them from the eyes of the waiting crowd. When they emerge and the door closes again behind them, it regains its previous transparency. Over and over again, people watch the door cloud over and then clear itself, delighted at its capacity to tease and at the same time hoping for a momentary breakdown in its action.
These doors strike me as the perfect metaphor for the ego: It comes into being when we have to go to the bathroom but is otherwise invisible. It has no ongoing, intrinsic reality. Poised between inner and outer, the ego is like a membrane. When it becomes permeable, our boundaries are temporarily lifted. When we prevent this permeability and instead inflate the ego’s “reality,” we are in effect erecting impermeable walls and creating our own isolation. When we learn to leave the ego alone, however, we discover that it does not have any ongoing durability. Released from our self-imposed walling off, we find ourselves connecting more deeply with whatever surrounds us.
As an example of this, a patient of mine, a photographer named Maya came to me complaining of a recurrent and disturbing dream of an intruder breaking into her house. Thinking first in a classical mode, I wondered to myself what feeling or urge she was afraid of, what aspect of her unconscious this intruder might represent. But something made me wait before floating such an idea.
While it did contain this motif, Maya’s dream was suggestive of something more. Maya felt that she had to be capable at all times, that nothing could ever be out of control in her life. Whenever this control was challenged—by her child’s chicken pox, the disarray of her home renovation, her husband’s moods, or her own negative feelings—she became despondent. In her dream, whenever the intruder broke in, Maya would become powerless to speak or to act. Mindful of how identified Maya was with her coping abilities, with her separated and individuated self, I suggested to her that perhaps, as Freud originally proposed, her dream was actually a wish. Perhaps she was secretly looking for a way to break a hole in her armor of capacity. Perhaps standing there powerless was exactly what she was seeking, although she did not know how to do it.
Maya’s difficulty, I thought, lay in an insufficient development of her capacity to be. It was not that her unconscious was so threatening that it had to be tamed further, but that she had not learned how to ride the waves of that which she could not control. She was an expert at coping but uncomfortable with silence, overly reliant on her ability to figure everything out. Very early in her life Maya had lost touch with her ability to put herself on pause. She had grown up fast but on a very insecure foundation. Imprisoned by the very qualities that she had built up so strongly, she had sought therapy with the unstated hope that I could help make the first chink in her armor.
Just as separation and connectedness make each other possible, so do the male and female elements of doing and being. One is not “primary,” nor is one always preferable, yet we are deficient if we cannot go freely from one mode into the other. This is what Maya needed to learn. She needed to recover a trust in her own capacity to let go.
One of the powerful consequences of my introductory experiences with the spiritual traditions of the East was that I became much less afraid of being with another person without being in control of the situation, a useful capacity in my role as a psychotherapist. And meditation further encouraged a trust that was difficult for me to find elsewhere, a trust in surrendering to the moment, to an emotional experience, no matter how threatening. Yet what I subsequently found was that I tended to get in the way of that trust by clinging to my newfound ability as if it would vanish without constant reinforcement. As Buddhism reminds us, we can cling to anything, even letting go. It took a much later therapeutic encounter to point this out to me.
A number of years after my initial exposure to meditation, when I was approaching my midthirties, I began a course of therapy and supervision with a senior Gestalt therapist in New York City, a man named Isadore From. I was already a therapist by this time, and Isadore was renowned as a teacher of therapists. He was a lovely man but exquisitely sensitive to any note of artifice. If I were to say to him, for instance, “I really like her!” he would immediately ask me what I did not like about the person in question. My use of “really” would strike him as an exaggeration that hid an ulterior meaning, and he would usually be right. He was a difficult man to hide from. In one of my first meetings with him, after completing a particular exchange, I reflexively prolonged my gaze, attempting to preserve and extend the eye contact that we had established. This was a strategy that, in retrospect, I believe I had cultivated since my encounter with Ram Dass, meaning to convey a sense of openness and availability, spiced with a dash of meaningfulness, a kind of soulful gaze.
“Are you aware that you are staring at me?” Isadore asked after a moment. “Blink!”
Once again, my fragile relationship to the capacity for being was revealed. I had turned it into something that I did instead of letting it be something that I was. Made anxious by the impending loss of connection, I was attempting to forestall the inevitable return to my own separateness by artificially prolonging my eye contact. It was like refusing to stop eating ice cream, not wanting to give up the taste, even though I was already full.
As Isadore made me see, my anxiety about losing that state introduced an artificial note into something that in its very nature is natural, spontaneous, and fleeting. Connection may be our natural state, as Buddhism teaches, but it is not static. Part of trusting in it is to let our experience of it come and go. While I was much more comfortable with my own capacity for silent communication, I still did not really trust that the connection I so valued was infinite and renewable. While he would never define himself as “spiritual” (having the same disdain for that word as he did for “really”), Isadore taught me a very subtle, but essential, spiritual lesson. To experience true connection I had to be willing to come back into myself.
This is a common frustration at the beginning of spiritual work. Once we discover that it is possible to relax the ego’s grip, we try to package this ability so that it will be there to prop us up. But this attempt at mastery immediately distances us from our goal—it introduces a note of falseness into something that happens naturally if left alone. The moment of first eye contact need not become a lifeless stare, as it did in my interaction with Isadore. If real, and therefore mutual, it makes us smile instead.