There is a story from the Buddha’s time about a householder named Nakulapita who went to the Buddha for advice on peace of mind. “I am old and decrepit,” he told the Buddha. “I am sick and constantly ailing. My body hurts all the time. What can I do to find happiness?”
The Buddha took Nakulapita’s complaints seriously. “Even so,” he said to him right away. (The Buddha often said, “Even so.” Like a good psychotherapist, he tended to agree with his patients’ self-assessments, even when they might wish them to be challenged.) “It is true, Nakulapita. Your body is old and sick. With a body like yours, even a moment of good health would be a miracle. Therefore, you should train yourself like this: ‘Though I am ill in body, my mind shall not be ill.’ ” Nakulapita felt refreshed by this possibility. His body was going to pieces but he did not have to fall apart. He went to one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, Sariputta, for further instruction.
Sariputta built upon the Buddha’s lesson in his subsequent teachings. “Do not look upon your body as your self,” he told Nakulapita. “Do not think that the body is the self or that the self is the body, or that the self is in the body or that the body is in the self. Do not look upon your feelings as your self, your thoughts as your self, even your consciousness as your self. Your body can change and become otherwise,” he told him, “but grief, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair do not have to arise.”1
Sariputta was teaching something very radical, that it was possible to let the mind float free of identifications with any aspect of the mind-body process. This is a point that the Tibetan Buddhists of many centuries later have also made in their secret teachings about orgasm and death. In both processes, the Tibetans teach, the self is swallowed up in the intensity of the experience. If we do not resist, we have the opportunity to glimpse this freely floating mind.
But the Tibetans believe that we are all afraid of this loss of self and that we unconsciously pull back from a complete immersion in the mind that peeks through in such situations. Even in sex, they say, we resist completely losing ourselves, while in death we are notoriously fearful. But they also believe, as the Buddha and Sariputta did, that it is possible to train the mind to sustain its awareness so that the bliss that naturally dawns in orgasm and in death can shine through and permeate our regular lives. Thus, while teaching the emptiness of all things (no self in the body, no self in feelings or thoughts, no self in consciousness), Buddhists also teach a positive emptiness, a luminous knowing that is sometimes called the clear light nature of mind. This is the mind that the Buddha was pointing out to Nakulapita, the mind that holds the key to relief.
In approaching old age, illness, and death we are all faced with the need for a mind that can withstand disintegration. Our usual strategies of managing threats to our self-sufficiency do not work very well in these situations. We are trained to keep ourselves together, but we do not get much teaching in falling apart. My own grandfather, whom I never knew, handed down to me a good lesson about this.
An intensely competent high school principal in Brooklyn, my grandfather Max was raised in South Carolina by parents who embraced a highly principled philosophy that seemed to have Victorian roots. Every morning he would study a kind of moral catechism that stressed the writings and sayings of great men, and he lived by these ethics as well as anyone might. He proudly taught my father, whom he had named after Benjamin Franklin, to read at the age of two, stringing flash cards down the staircase so that my father could sit at the bottom of the stairs and watch the letters of the alphabet come fluttering down to him. He had a huge workbench full of tools in his basement and fingers that were crooked from years of playing catcher in semiprofessional baseball leagues.
Several years after insulating the attic of his home, he developed a malignant tumor of the lungs that was caused by inhaling fragments of the newly marketed asbestos fibers that he was using. Treated at home for as long as possible, he received regular injections of morphine for his pain that my father, at the age of sixteen, learned how to administer. Yet through all of this he never told his wife what he himself knew: that he was dying. Protecting my grandmother from the pain of his own death, he never permitted her to hug him good-bye.
Despite my grandfather’s moral backbone and intellectual accomplishments, he was unable or unwilling to face the reality of his impending death with my grandmother. Perhaps he was attempting to protect her, the way one wishes one could do for a child. My grandmother never really knew. She was left to struggle with feeling betrayed by the person whom she had loved most in the world. And her pain, judging from the tears shed fifty years later as she told me her story, had not abated in the interim.
In the story of the Buddha’s life there was a similar situation. After his mother’s death in childbirth, the Buddha-to-be grew up in a royal household in which any hints of old age, illness, or death were prohibited by his father’s decree. Suckled by wet nurses and raised in the most privileged surroundings of his day, young Gautama was kept isolated from any whisper of death. Out riding in the countryside one day, he chanced upon an old person, a sick person, and a corpse—sights he had never before seen. The feelings aroused in him by these sights were so disturbing that they prompted him to forsake all that his father had created for him. He left his palace and his family and began a search for peace of mind. He later called those images of old age, illness, and death the “three messengers” that awaken people to the spiritual life.
“Did you ever see in the world a man, or a woman, eighty, ninety, or a hundred years old,” asked the Buddha in a famous talk many years later, “frail, crooked as a gable-roof, bent down, resting on crutches, with tottering steps, infirm, youth long since fled, with broken teeth, gray and scanty hair or none, wrinkled, with blotched limbs? And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to decay, that you also cannot escape it?”2
The Buddha’s father did everything for him except provide him with a forum to explore death. Like my grandfather, he hoped to spare his loved ones the pain of this reality, but as the Buddha discovered, this is not a viable approach. It is much better to confront the truth head on. Indeed, in the Buddhist meditative tradition it was not unusual for beginning meditators to spend extended periods meditating on the bodies of corpses in cremation grounds, sitting with the emotions that arise when confronted with such stark reality.
In Buddhism, it is understood that meditation is practice for death. The ability to open one’s mind to the unstructured reality that is beyond identification with mind and body is seen as the crucial link between dying and practice. In the secret Tibetan traditions, advanced meditation practices actually involve simulating the dissolution of consciousness that takes place at death so that the yogi can gain experience with the mind of clear light. These are very complicated practices that are engaged in only after years of preparatory study and meditation.
For many years, I was unsure if these practices were still alive or if they existed only in the esoteric books I was fond of reading. But by the time I was done with medical school, through a curious set of circumstances, I had come face to face with Tibetan monks in India who were the masters of these techniques.
During my time in college and medical school I would occasionally drop by the office of Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at the Harvard Medical School for whom I had worked one summer after my sophomore year in college. Dr. Benson was responsible for some of the earliest and best physiological documentation of the benefits of meditation. His book, The Relaxation Response, published in 1975, described this research and introduced the notion of meditation as effective for relieving stress. Dr. Benson and I traded ideas about medicine, meditation, and life in general.
During one of these meetings, Dr. Benson asked me if I had ever read the reports of the French explorer Alexandra David-Neel from the beginning of the century about her experiences in Tibet. Magic and Mystery in Tibet was the most well known of her texts. I was familiar with the books but had not read them. Dr. Benson wanted to know if I had ever heard of any of the “miracles” that she reported encountering: monks who could fly or who could raise their body temperatures to the point where they could sit outside in freezing temperatures and dry wet sheets with the heat of their naked bodies. I confessed that I had not but told him that I had heard that the Dalai Lama was planning a trip to the East Coast shortly, and I thought that if we went through the appropriate channels, we could ask him ourselves.
We went through those channels and several months later, in the fall of 1979, found ourselves face-to-face with the Dalai Lama. Dr. Benson spoke of his curiosity and of the potential benefits of documenting such prodigious accomplishments if indeed they existed. The Dalai Lama acknowledged the existence of the “heat yoga” practices, stressed their secrecy and the potential for misunderstanding what they were all about, but seemed interested in the possibility of allowing Western science to document the “inner science” of his religion and culture.
It was not too long before I found myself part of a research team in Dharamsala, India, inserting rectal probes into the bodies of slightly bemused but cooperative monks who were interrupting their years of solitary retreat in cabins in the Himalayan foothills to participate in our project. Under the auspices of the Dalai Lama, our research team hiked to the remote cabins of three yogis and subjected them to a battery of tests as they meditated. The monks, whose good humor and serenity were palpable even as we made our measurements, were indeed doing something extraordinary. They were able to reach inside their involuntary nervous systems and gain control of the mechanisms that regulated their peripheral body temperatures. They could sit in their unheated cabins dressed only in the thinnest of cotton robes and keep themselves warm no matter how cold it was outside.
We wrote up our findings in a scholarly journal3 and proudly discussed them for the national news media upon our return, but we were really seeing only a fraction of what these monks were accomplishing. Our approach was rather like investigating the existence of an automobile by measuring its exhaust or that of a dog by studying the wagging of its tail. Indeed, these monks were engaged in practices designed to open their minds to a luminosity that our scientific instruments have not yet found a way to measure. Their ability to affect their involuntary nervous systems was an outward sign of a more profound inner transformation. They were learning to simulate death and to saturate their minds with the bliss of an extended orgasm.4 In so doing, as the Buddha suggested to Nakulapita, they were eradicating every last vestige of fear of old age, illness, and death. The relief that comes from this fearlessness was wonderful to see.
It was, of course, easier for us to talk about physiological changes than spiritual ones. It can be difficult for the uninitiated to get a clear sense of what the mind that dawns in death or in orgasm could possibly be like. One of the best descriptions that I have found comes from a dream reported by Heinz Pagels, a Rockefeller University quantum physicist and avid mountain climber who was killed in a mountaineering accident in 1988.
“I often dream about falling,” wrote Pagels in his book The Cosmic Code. “Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.”5
What Pagels described is a beautiful evocation of the kind of mind that arises naturally in meditation as the usual identifications with more superficial aspects of the self are stripped away. It is negative in the sense of there being nothing to hold on to, but positive in the sense of there being an underlying conscious life energy that is luminous and knowing. In Buddhist psychology, this underlying and more subtle consciousness is known to be more powerful than the grosser minds of thought and sensory consciousness that usually dominate our awareness. It is known to be more powerful not because it has been measured, but because it has been felt.
It is the function of meditation to make this knowledge accessible and incontrovertible. The mind, taught the Buddha, is like a nugget of gold. Before it is worked on, it does not look like much, but if you know what to do with it, you can make it shine. The mind that realizes its own Buddha nature is said to be like clear space—it is empty and all-pervasive but also vividly aware.6 These two qualities, of knowing and spaciousness, correspond to the positive and negative aspects of emptiness. In the Buddhist teachings they are inextricably linked, united in the center of the mandala in an ecstatic embrace, creating the field in which the phenomenal world takes form.
This luminous nature of mind, while underlying our everyday experience the way the quantum universe underlies the material one, is useful to us only if it is acknowledged. Most of the time, because it challenges our conventional view of things and our need for security, we refuse to take note of this dimension of reality. Only very occasionally, maintain the Tibetan “inner scientists,” during uncontrolled events like sneezing, fainting, going to sleep, ending a dream, having an orgasm, or dying, does this clear light nature of mind shine through our everyday consciousness.7 Most of the time, our habits are such that we ignore these brief openings and climb back immediately into the daily world of our defenses. We do not take refuge in the relief that is available to us.
The Tibetan monks whom we studied were actually practicing keeping their minds in these openings, using techniques of esoteric meditation to manifest and dwell within their minds of clear light. Their practices were related to the more well-known Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which the dying person is counselled not to identify with the various fears that arise in the process of dying but to yield to the mind that underlies conventional reality.
It was the cultivation of this mind of pure awareness that distinguished the esoteric practices that the Dalai Lama permitted us to investigate in the Himalayas. But it was not necessary to travel all the way to India to discover the positive side of emptiness, nor did I need to engage in the most esoteric Buddhist practices to become convinced of its accessibility. Just as the Tibetans found that the clear light nature of mind shines through whenever we let go of identification with the mind’s content, so have I found that this silent center of the human personality can manifest in the most mundane situations. Whether it is revealed in lovemaking, meditation, or psychotherapy, this unstructured and unintegrated state of mind is the foundation of all that is healing.
Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world. And like meditation, therapy can show us how much we identify with our thinking minds, the way Nakulapita identified with his deteriorating body. What therapy can also offer is a window into that liberating state of mind that comes from the absence of identification. This happens most often in those moments when we are least sure of just what therapy is supposed to be doing.
“Why keep coming to therapy if I have nothing to say?” we ask, with the same fears that the Tibetans notice in the face of death. We worry, thinking, “I don’t know what to talk about,” not realizing that such moments are the threshold of the relief we are seeking. The idea of surrendering to a fertile silence, like yielding to an unpredictable arousal, is threatening to a brittle self that is secretly protecting an untouched and long-forgotten soul. Only very occasionally can we float free in the abyss, as Dr. Pagels described.
There is an apocryphal tale of James Joyce asking Carl Jung what the difference was between his own mind and that of his schizophrenic daughter that illustrates this point.
“She falls,” Jung is said to have replied. “You jump!”
I unexpectedly had a sense of this on another meditation retreat. I was in western Massachusetts during a very cold February, sitting silently over a ten-day period. Every day after lunch, instead of taking my customary nap, I decided to put on five layers of clothing and walk in the surrounding countryside for an hour. I tried to time my excursions to be back in time for the first afternoon meditation. The winter had been filled with snowstorms, and the rural forests and farmlands surrounding the meditation center had taken on the ghostly and sparkling look of Alaskan tundra.
Each day I would walk briskly and meditatively with my eyes down and my attention focused on my body’s movements. There were empty roads and paths leading every which way so that after thirty minutes I would always be in a completely different place. At that point I would stop and look around with the full force of my concentrated awareness before turning and heading back.
The first day I found myself in the middle of a frozen lake with a windstorm swirling the snow in circles about me. The second day I was halfway up a hill looking up at the sky at the instant that the first flakes of a new snowfall came fluttering down in slow motion on to my upturned face. The next day I was standing silently in the middle of a completely still forest when, with a sudden whoosh, an owl swooped low over my head with one huge dark wing extended.
I began to think there was something awesome about my timing. How was it that, at the exact moment of my stopping, such incredible things were happening? It took me longer than I am prepared to admit to realize that such things were always happening. It was only that I was finally paying attention.
These walks taught me much about the function of meditation. My practice was like the methodical thirty-minute walk. It could take me somewhere, but I had to remember to look around once I got there. Those moments of silent awareness in the forest were precious because of how open and connected I felt. Rather than feeling one with the universe, I still felt my own presence, yet my experience of myself was altered. Like a child whose mind is free to roam because he is secure in his mother’s presence, I completely let down my guard. I had the awareness of just how unimportant my efforts to understand myself were. Relaxing my mind into its own deeper nature, as I was doing spontaneously when I interrupted my walk, I could reach beyond my personality into something more open.
Like meditation, psychotherapy can be a vehicle for this kind of reappraisal. It, too, can seem like a long walk that suddenly opens up into an extraordinary vision of something that has always been available but has been unrecognized. A longtime patient of mine, with whom I worked for about ten years, elucidated for me how psychotherapy can function in this manner. Greta came to see me every week as she navigated work and family issues, successfully raising three children alone while working a full-time job. She wanted therapy because she felt lonely and because she was vaguely aware of how judgmental she was toward most people in her life. When disappointed or hurt by someone, Greta’s tendency was to write them off forever. She could be quite unforgiving.
Over the years we developed a very strong connection which was probably responsible for Greta’s staying with therapy for such a long time. In the midst of her highly pressured life she felt the sessions to be an oasis of mostly positive feeling, despite the occasional bothersome realization of my inaccessible private life. My impetus in our sessions was always to give Greta space, to open up the cracks between issues or between thoughts and to see what was there. I found a great deal of feeling, some of it loving and appreciative and some of it angry.
My work with Greta felt like untangling my daughter’s knotted hair or like untying a fine gold chain. I would get one little strand free, open up a little space, and then start working on the next piece. As I proceeded in this manner, Greta became more and more able to freely express her resentful feelings toward me. One evening, after having been at my office that afternoon, she was struck by a huge wave of love for me that made her feel very peaceful. She was having extraordinarily positive feelings for me without wanting anything back. That evening she had two dreams.
In the first, Greta dreamed of herself with her father when she was three or four years old and felt with great conviction the unconflicted love she had for him at that time. Since Greta had only spoken of her father in the most unfavorable terms, finding him to be pompous, self-centered, and boorish, this was a major surprise to both of us. Coming out of the first dream, Greta had one question. Where had this love gone?
The second dream answered the question. Again Greta dreamed of her father, but this time she heard herself yelling at him.
“Can’t you shut up?” she screamed in her dream. “You’re talking at me all the time. I don’t know my own thoughts. I don’t even know who I am.”
Greta remembered how relentlessly her father had pursued her as she grew up, how attached he was to her love, and how needy he was for reassurance.
“He wouldn’t leave me alone,” she told me regretfully.
Greta’s father would become irate whenever she disappointed him, and she finally had to close herself off from him in order to find some peace. In the next session after her dreams, Greta confirmed something that is the key to both Buddhism and psychotherapy.
“The defense is what hurt,” she told me.
In protecting herself from her father’s intrusive neediness, Greta had erected an unforgiving veneer that had interfered with her ability to find fulfillment as an adult. This was the defense to which she referred. While Greta needed to close herself off to her love for her father in order to find herself, she also needed to recover her love in order to be whole. Without this recovery, Greta could know herself only as an angry woman. Our therapy relationship had untangled enough of that defense for Greta to open her heart to me and then to dream of the love that had been hiding. Made inaccessible by her father’s overbearing intrusiveness, this love was the underlying reality from which she had been estranged. As she worked her way around the defense, getting to know it in her relationship with me, the love that it had obscured came flooding back.
Many weeks later Greta came to my office and pointed to her head with a smile. “It’s so quiet in here now,” she sighed contentedly.
In her realization that the defense is what hurts, Greta was, in her own way, articulating the central concept of this book. In coping with the world, we come to identify only with our compensatory selves and our reactive minds. We build up our selves out of our defenses but then come to be imprisoned by them. This leaves us feeling dissatisfied, irritable, and cut off. In our misguided attempts to become more self-assured, we tend to build up our defenses even more, rather than disentangling ourselves from them. We use therapy to apportion blame rather than to learn tolerance. This gives us a bigger and better self but not a truer or happier one. It only exacerbates the problem.
Greta’s breakthrough relates to an old Zen story that has done much to inform my own practice. An aged Chinese monk, after many years of practice without deep realization, went to his master and asked for permission to go off into the mountains to seek enlightenment in an isolated cave. His master, seeing the monk’s sincerity, urged him on his way. Taking his robes, his begging bowl, and a few possessions, the monk headed out on foot through the neighboring villages and up into the mountains. As he began his ascent, he saw an old man carrying a huge bundle on his back, winding his way down the path from the mountains toward him. According to the story, this man was actually the boddhisattva Manjushri who appears to people at the moment they are ready for enlightenment. Greeting the monk, the boddhisattva asked him where he was heading.
“Oh,” said the monk, “I am going to the furthest mountains to find a cave in which to meditate. I will stay there until I die or realize awakening.”
At this point, something made the monk look more closely at the old man in his path.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you know anything of this enlightenment?”
At this point, the old man simply dropped his bundle onto the ground. Just like that, the monk was enlightened. In an instant he, too, had put down his whole defensive organization, the entire burden. But the newly awakened monk was still a bit confused.
“Now what?” he asked Manjushri.
And the boddhisattva, smiling, silently reached down, picked up his bundle, and continued down the path.8
Putting down our burdens does not mean forsaking the conventional world in which our compensatory selves and thinking minds are necessary, but it means being in that world with the consciousness of one who is not deceived by appearances. Once Greta had recovered her love for her father, she could continue to fend him off with forgiveness instead of rancor. She still needed her defenses, but she was not imprisoned by them. She stopped hating him for imposing so many restrictions on her expression of love and instead began to work within the limitations without taking them personally. As the newly enlightened monk realized when he saw Manjushri pick up his bundle and head back to town, everything had changed but nothing was altered.
Of course, this readjustment is fraught with its own share of difficulties, not the least of which is the cockiness that often accompanies a little bit of realization. This point was driven home to me after my last meditation retreat as I was preparing to leave the meditation center and drive myself back to the city. It had begun to snow in the early hours of the morning and had become quite stormy by the time I went out to my automobile after breakfast. I unlocked my car, sat down in the front seat, started up the motor, turned on my headlights, windshield wipers, defroster, and radio, and sat for a moment in the driver’s seat, feeling myself reemerge as a confident and capable person. I had a five-hour drive ahead of me through the snowstorm, but I felt clearheaded and well equipped.
I noticed that the snow had caked all over the side and rear windows, and I reached behind me into the backseat to locate the snow brush that lay on the floor. I found and grabbed it without looking, and in one fluid motion I opened my door, pressed the automatic button to “unlock” so that I could get back in, maneuvered myself out of the car, and slammed the door shut to beginning cleaning the windows. I did this all very fast, as if doing a complicated dance that I knew very well, and in an instant I was standing outside my running car with its doors closed, lights on, and windshield wipers and radio going. I knew immediately that something was wrong, however. I had executed my dance perfectly, but with one small mistake. I had locked the door instead of unlocking it and shut myself out of my running car. I had no other key.
My mind was quiet from ten days of meditation, and I could see every thought in Technicolor. I was totally aghast and at the same time slightly amused. I remembered the Sufi Nasruddin, a wise man and fool who was found searching for the key to his house under a lamppost because there was more light there, even though he knew he had lost it elsewhere. I thought briefly of trying that maneuver but realized it was a dead end in this case. I tried every door a couple of times and then trudged up the hill to the meditation center to look for a maintenance person who I thought might have a tool for unlocking the car. I had to wait around for him, but when he finally rolled in, I told him of my predicament.
“I’m sure you’ve had this happen before,” I said hopefully, thinking that he would be able to free me from my situation without further ado.
“Nope,” he replied very slowly, elongating each word with the trace of a southern drawl. “Can’t say that we have.”
I knew then that I would have to call AAA and wait to be rescued. The staff people at the meditation center were doing their best not to make fun of me, but I knew what they were thinking. “Very mindful! Ten days of meditation and he locks his keys in his car.”
I went over the seeds of my mistake in my own mind. I was heading back to my real life after the stillness of the meditation retreat. I was invigorated like the old monk who had put down his bundle. There was that moment in the front seat when I thought I could do anything, and I had executed my movements smoothly and efficiently, with such ease. But now I was out in the cold, my car running on without me. “What good was this practice if this is what happens?” I began to think, when suddenly I realized that I was expecting myself, once again, to be infallible. This was another situation in which I was expecting perfection. I was disappointed that the retreat had not yielded up a more efficient and improved self.
“Oh, well,” I thought, with the mental equivalent of a sigh, “I might as well learn my lesson right away. I can’t even get out the door without stumbling.”
But the funny thing was, this is as far as it went. I felt embarrassed but not humiliated. My thoughts did not circle the event endlessly. I adjusted myself to the new reality, waited for half an hour for the AAA man to unlock my door, and in the next instant I was on my way.
I did not need to be infallible to get home, I realized. Nor did I always have to be in control. The retreat had changed something in my mind. Retaining a sense of expansiveness toward things instead of the usual contraction, I felt a spirit of generosity toward myself. Things did not have to be perfect for me to be okay, it seemed.
With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me. Rolling through the Massachusetts countryside in the midst of the early morning snowstorm, I felt the freedom that comes from accepting what is. Going down that road, I did not feel half bad.