5
COMPASSION DOES NOT ARISE from ideals of perfection but from a recognition of and concern for our own fallibility. At the heart of our potential for health and wholeness is the need for a fundamental quality of acceptance, an unconditional compassionate presence. Without this capacity either for ourselves or for others, even our spirituality can become harsh and uncompromising.
While we may begin to understand our intrinsic potential, our human fallibility is nevertheless glaringly evident in so many aspects of life. We may try to overlook it or strive towards some ideal or vision of perfection, but even then, our humanity is just below the surface. The spiritual search and the quest for personal growth is often an attempt to transcend this fallibility. We may have a vision of wholeness, but if we relate to this vision unskillfully, it may not lead us beyond suffering but instead perpetuate its causes.
For many of my early years as a Buddhist I was driven by a desire to live up to an ideal of the bodhisattva whose exemplary life and attitude were models of virtue. This desire provoked a kind of obsession with trying to be virtuous, peaceful, and well-behaved. The group of peers with whom I lived was equally caught up in presenting a veneer of goodness and piety. Furthermore, this ideal acted as a stick with which to beat myself. I berated myself for not being good enough, for falling short of the ideal. I would sometimes feel unworthy of my teacher’s attention and would fear that he must be able to see how gross and deluded I was.
When I think of how uncomfortable this experience was, I am shocked at the depth of my self-negation and self-judgment. I was caught in a state of mind that had no love and acceptance of myself for who I was. There was no compassion in my self-view and I had internalized the view that self-improvement was the goal. I had to set my sight on becoming a better, more wholesome, less selfish, good person; then I would be acceptable. I am not alone in becoming involved in a Buddhist culture that neurotically sees striving for selfbetterment as the goal. If our wounded lack of self-value is at the root of our striving to attain a state of perfect enlightenment, then we are in serious danger not just of deluding ourselves but of actually aggravating our emotional wounding.
Today as never before there is a vast industry based upon selfimprovement, which has at its heart the sense that we are not acceptable as we are. We must be better, faster, slimmer, more attractive, more dynamic, etc. This is our twenty-first-century version of original sin. Our sin is that we are not good enough and there are countless icons, presented particularly in the media, of what we must live up to. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this are in the cult of the celebrity and the culture of fashion and body shape. But there are many ways in which we constantly measure and judge ourselves.
Unfortunately for many of us, the spiritual side of our lives is not immune to this same disposition. If the ideals by which we measure ourselves are spiritual, then the desire to be seen as spiritually evolved can be just as pressuring and demanding. We must become more conscious, more caring, more open, more pure, more enlightened, and so on. In many ways, idealism can be seen as being at the very heart of a spiritual path. The idea of self-development or spiritual development usually has an ideal as its central premise, couched in terms such as “living to one’s full potential” or “becoming enlightened.”
While self-improvement may sound reasonable as an aspect of Buddhist practice, this view needs to carry something of a health warning. The intention of self-betterment carries a potentially unhealthy Shadow which is, often, a fundamental lack of self-worth and selfacceptance. The need to be different and live up to an ideal can lack an essential compassion that allows us to be who we are.
In the therapeutic setting, I encounter Buddhist practitioners whose view of the path seems driven by an intense striving to be a better person. This striving is based on a fundamental lack of self-acceptance. Their spiritual urgency is often born out of a desire to be good, caring, sensitive, and wise, as this will lead to a sense of self-affirmation. Scratch the surface of this spiritual correctness and we discover deep insecurities, lack of self-worth, and lack of self-acceptance. The resulting need for love and acceptance is what the psychotherapy world calls narcissistic wounding and can make spirituality self-preoccupied. We may attempt to cover this wounding with a veneer of spiritual goodness, but this does not heal the root. It will often feel inauthentic.
I recall a young Western Tibetan Buddhist nun living within a community I was part of. She tried hard to live the pure, selfless existence she saw exemplified in the teachings. She seldom if ever considered her own needs. She would sleep very little and constantly worked to take care of others. Many of us would say, “Look at her, she is such a bodhisattva.” Sadly, it was evident that beneath this utter dedication to serve her teachers and work tirelessly for others was a desperately sad and unhappy person. She would seldom acknowledge this because to do so would be to think of herself. Suppressing her own inner need or pain was crucial to her.
In time, however, she became sick and her inner struggle started to break through the veneer of her idealized bodhisattva persona. Fortunately, she was taken in hand by a very kind visiting old lady who could see straight through her mask. Letting go of the imperative to negate herself in order to feel acceptable would not be easy. She did eventually do so and let go of something of the fanatical ideal she had set herself to live by. Her example stood out for me of how the ideal of a bodhisattva’s total selflessness must be born out of a healthy sense of self-worth and self-love if it is not simply to become part of our pathology.
It was Freud who first introduced the notion of a superego as the internalized image of the ideal we should live up to, the internal ideal against which we judge ourselves. Whether one can say that in all cultures a superego is developed to the same degree is not certain. In Western culture there are high expectations and pressures placed upon the individual, beginning in childhood, to live up to ideals of material success, physical excellence, intelligence, perfection, and goodness. Whether these ideals are defined in the family by parental expectations or in broader society, their power can be immense. To internalize a process of self-judgment against an ideal can lead to a constant feeling that we are fundamentally not acceptable as we are. We must do better, improve, grow, and develop.
The desire to improve and be a better person has, it would seem, a double edge to it. Yes, why not try to clean up our lives and be a more kind, caring, and considerate person? Why not aspire to be more ethically wholesome, more tolerant, and to stop harming others? But the desire to live up to some ideal has a number of hazardous consequences. What is unacceptable will become suppressed into what Jung called a Shadow. When we learn to hide and eventually deny our failings, it can lead to an unconscious spiritual grandiosity. Cultivated goodness and piety can eventually cause an individual to see him- or herself as special and spiritually gifted. If this way of being gains outer acclaim and approbation, the grandiose self-deception can grow, making it increasingly hard to acknowledge failings. Once again, scratch the surface and we find a lack of compassion, a failure to accept who we are, with our positive qualities and our failings.
In my early years as a Buddhist I readily confused the difference between a path that was about becoming perfect and one that led to the understanding that all things, as they are, are intrinsically perfect. Despite the underpinning view of nonduality, in Buddhist philosophy the search for perfection is glaringly dualistic and yet so central to many people’s thinking. The Buddhist understanding of emptiness and nonduality is that all relative phenomena are contingent, lacking an inherent, independent nature. Attempting to perfect a relative state of being is to attempt to make relative truth into an absolute. This fails to recognize the essential Buddhist understanding that only by going beyond such distinctions of good and bad, perfect and imperfect, can we discover the ultimate truth beyond duality. As the Buddha taught in the Heart Sutra, phenomena are neither impure nor are they free of impurity.
The idealism that leads to a desire for or addiction to perfection on the spiritual path can be, psychologically, very damaging. The Buddhist path recognizes that it is folly to search for perfection in life. All this searching does is lead to endless suffering and dissatisfaction. As Chögyam Trungpa pointed out, we go around and around, trying to improve ourselves through struggle, until we realize that the ambition to improve ourselves is itself the problem.16 The only road to perfection is for the ego to finally give up this search and allow what is, recognizing that our innate Buddha nature is beyond the relative qualities of good and bad. To become enlightened is not about perfecting our relative state of being but is about recognizing our true nature.
At the heart of our striving is our fundamental wound, our wounded ego-identity. If we can address this problem we can alter the whole basis of our life. When we begin to see our wound it is tempting to think we must change, we must make it different so that we can live our lives the way we might wish. I am reminded of a discussion with a client who recognized his deep-rooted fear, vulnerability, and lack of self-acceptance. He saw these as the ingredients that always made him profoundly fearful and uncomfortable with others, and he desperately wanted to get rid of them. His inclination was to embark upon endless workshops and therapy techniques to find the solution. He felt unacceptable as he was and would brutally berate himself for not being able to be with people without severe anxiety.
As we spoke, it was clear that the only way to resolve this struggle was to begin to give up the pressure to be something he was not. Rather than forcing himself to be different, he needed to fundamentally accept his distressed sense of self and begin to create an atmosphere that cared for and allowed it to be as it was. If he could establish a depth of acceptance that did not judge and criticize this wound, there would be a greater ease within himself about his distress. It was as though he needed to set up an internal environment that was like a loving, compassionate parent who simply held his painful self-identity without judgment. With this inner environment he could be more at ease with himself. In time he indeed began to struggle less within, not by trying to change but just by cultivating a growing sense of compassion and acceptance of who he was as a whole, with strengths and weaknesses. As this has happened, his capacity to cope with previously paralyzing social settings has also radically changed.
There is humility, honesty, and compassion in the capacity to allow our fallibility and frailty as human, sentient beings. To try to be otherwise can be seen as embracing a kind of false self that is in denial of our fallibility. This compassion allows us to be who we are without destructive judgment and self-criticism. This does not mean we do not address our faults or our Shadow, but that we see them with far greater acceptance, lightness, and humor. If we can live openly and honestly, we can relax and be more present. For me, the experience of accepting myself more made it possible to be present with my teachers in a more comfortable way. I was not pretending or trying to be something I was not.
With greater self-acceptance and love also comes a diminution of the intensity of striving, and a greater capacity to be present and authentic to where we are. When I was in India living close to Tibetan monks and lamas, I was often surprised at the apparently easy-going, laid-back way in which many of them seemed to live their practice. They often responded to my intensity and fervor with the expression kale kale pe ro nang (literally “please go slowly”). Essentially, what they were saying was take it easy, go slowly, and you get there. They seemed highly amused by the attitude I had towards my practice, as though they could not understand why I was so driven. They did not have the underlying emotional disposition in their psyches that said they were not good enough. This does not mean they did not practice and work hard. It meant that they let things be and did not have the neurotic intensity of striving many of us suffer from in the West.
This more compassionate attitude of deeper self-acceptance enables us to practice with a much lighter touch. It enables a deeper sense of ease with ourselves that influences our capacity to sit in meditation. When there is less intensity, the mind becomes more relaxed and thereby able to quieten and open to its innate spaciousness and clarity.
As we deepen our sense of ease with ourselves, the fundamental wounding to our self-identity will soften. This softening leads to a greater inner space that can more naturally respond to others. While we are caught in our wounded self-preoccupations, we have no space for others. An inner atmosphere of compassion and acceptance slowly softens the rigidity of our wounding. As we become less self-preoccupied we begin to find a capacity to respond to others, and we may discover that we are able to be present, compassionate, and caring without judging. Our compassion grows as we allow others to be who they are with their faults and struggles, their unique qualities and gifts.
If we can bring together a vision of our innate potential with the compassion that recognizes and accepts where we are as human beings, our path can be caring and honest while being rich in creative potential. Our path must begin from where we are, not from some false distortion of ourselves in an attempt to be spiritual and special. Grandiosity comes when we get hooked on our visions and fail to live honestly and compassionately with our fallibility. There is nobility in our humanity and when we truly accept and surrender, we open naturally to our clear, brilliant nature because it is always there in the present in each moment. As we do so we must learn to live with a central paradox, which is that while we may endeavor to change and grow, change actually comes when we accept fully what is.