An existential Buddhist analysis of the self as the “struggle to exist”
Day 1: The Phenomenology of Consciousness as Sunyata
For Sartre, consciousness is a lack. To understand consciousness is to understand lack. It is a “lack” because consciousness is only ever consciousness of some “thing”. Consciousness, in itself, is empty. It is from an appreciation of this “lack” that all other existential givens (emptiness, impermanence, angst) potentially flow. The idea of consciousness as a “lack” also offers an alternative explanation to what traditional psychology interprets as “pathology”: both psychosis and neurosis are born out of a particular relation to this lack. But it is not only modern psychology that might have misrepresented what flows from this lack. For example, religious Buddhists are in the habit of problematising desire. For the existentialist, especially a Sartrean, desire is inescapable because of how it flows from this fundamental “lack”. When we talk of desire, here, we are not only talking about sexual desire but all and any desire can be seen as a longing that springs forth from our lack. Ultimately, our longing is to be something solid. As my PhD supervisor, Prof Kevin Boileau succinctly illustrates in Essays on Phenomenology and the self (2012):
Consciousness is lack and, as such, creates its own fundamental project that varies among individuals. But for all of us this desire is a desire for a future fullness, which is the desire to be a substantial self and yet to remain a free consciousness. It is a desire to be an object among objects while remaining free, which is an impossible project according to Sartre.
This is where Buddhism, read as a radical existentialism, makes sense: It is not so much that desire is bad (as religious connotations would have it) but that desire (or tanha in Buddhism) is an “impossible project” as we never really fulfill our desire for “future fullness”. This also links to the Buddhist idea of “anatman” – denial of the self. As already mentioned, there is no self to be found as the originator of consciousness. In the more radically existentialist branches of Buddhism (proponents of Early Buddhism or aspects of Zen Buddhism) there isn’t even a likening to Sartre’s idea of a “pure consciousness” (the appreciation of conscious experience free of ideas about the world), only a “sense consciousness” (the censorial, non-dual immediacy of consciousness in world). See for example, this verse supposedly uttered by the Buddha (source unknown):
In what is seen there should be just the seen
In what is heard there should be just the heard
In what is sensed (smell, taste or touch) there
should be just the sensing; in what is thought
there should be the thought.
In Buddhism, everything, including the self is “sunya” – lacking essence. Everything arises and falls according to conditions; nothing is self -determining and we live out a constant attempt to fill this lack. As David Loy points out, in Lack & Transcendence (2018), even our sense of time may originate from our attempts to deal with this lack. Without our concepts of time, we risk falling into an abyss. However, with a sense of self comes an underlying fear of lack as there is nothing solid to this sense (of self) – it is as fleeting as any other sensation. The “sense of self” is exactly that – a “sensation” (or a collection of sensations). Anxiety is, therefore, not something we have, or suffer from, but something that we are. Anxiety is the knotted belly of the sense of self because what underlies our sense of self is a dread that we, actually, do not exist. This usually manifests as fear of death. In order to shrink back from this anxiety, we tend to shrink away from life itself. It is not just our own death we fear, it is as if we fear being rubbed out by experience and so we cling to ideas of who we are. In this way, as David Loy puts it, fear of death doubles up as a fear of life. From this perspective, Buddhist methods can be viewed as a means of embracing the totality of life rather than a nihilism (as it is often interpreted as). But, to embrace life, we must embrace death or at least “lack” – Sunyata.
It is well-established practice to consider death in existential analysis. However, death tricks us: death is most present in its absence, when we are alive, but when we are finally dead we are not present to our own death. Our death is ever present, through our anxiety about it, and yet never fully realised. The radical existential view is that there is nothing to fear but our own “no-thing-ness”. However, according to both Buddha and Sartre, being “no-thing” is the actual answer. David Loy speaks about how meditation can be a practicing of death without dying. For Loy, it is not so much that we fear death (as many other Existentialists might report) but that we suspect that we don’t really exist in the first place. Therefore, much of our behaviour (and our neurosis) is perhaps fed by this fear of our “nothingness”. Perhaps we all, ultimately, yearn to have some sort of special value or meaning in the world? And, it is perhaps only through the “other” (through the way is which others hold us in regard) that we hope to feel “real” enough (this facilitative role of the gaze of the “other” will be explored in further in Day 4.
The experience of “things”
It is not all lack, we still have an experience and it is important to understand experience in order to deal with it. It was Husserl, the pioneer of phenomenology, who pointed out that conscious experience is always in regard to some “thing” and the experience of these things is clouded by the concepts that we have about them (I would add here – clouded by the concepts we have about ourselves and others). Husserl’s phenomenological ambition was an attempt to “get back to things themselves” and to achieve this, he suggested that we “bracket” our ideas about the world in doubt. Consciousness is also not a continuous or solid event, but is made up of individual “mind moments” (to use a Buddhist phrase). These “mind moments” occur within the context of a state (or as Heidegger might call, a “mood”). Consciousness is more of a constant flux between these states than a continuous experience. Sartre adds to Husserl’s work by indicating that we construct an “I” (and a “you” for that matter) that we treat as a “thing” to be held in regard in consciousness. Furthermore, the “self”, this supposed “thing”, is something we try and anchor into within the flux of consciousness. Yet, as with all “things”, the self remains empty of any “self-being” or “self-origination” (again, these are common Buddhist phrases that I am applying to phenomenology). It becomes particularly troublesome when we encounter another consciousness in consciousness as our tendency is to reduce that other experiencing subject into a thing (just like any other thing, such as a table or chair). We will explore this a bit further in Days 4 and 5.
We are essentially meaning making creatures, yet, at the same time, we also have the capacity to “dis-identify” with the meanings we have attached to things. Phenomenology is an attempt at bracketing our ideas about the world in order to reveal how they potentially obfuscate experience. This is, perhaps, to some extent what meditation is – a practice of dis-identification (or unlearning) of the concepts we attach to things and how we experience them. But, the meaning we give to things are not stand alone “things” in our heads, they are manifestations of overall, shifting, states of mind. Put another way: our thoughts are very much caught up in our states of mind, like driftwood in a current. In psychology this is called “mood congruent thought”, but it seems even more encompassing than this – my state of mind colours the world I experience and, therefore, how I tend to react and act in response to it. Furthermore, my actions and reactions seem to have a way of perpetuating the states from which they arose.
Consciousness and “I”
Can Husserl’s ideal of “pure consciousness” ever be experienced? Is this the fantasy of enlightenment that Buddhists have entertained all along? Can we ever truly see things “as they are”? Is experience not always adrift in a murky sea of language? Is consciousness ever a state-free experience? Perhaps the best we can hope for is that a meditative attitude towards experience puts some insight generating distance between our experience and the meaning that we give to our experiences? In the end, the problem may not be that we are thinking animals, or the thoughts in themselves (the meanings we give), but the fact that we cling to these “things” (thoughts, meanings, assumptions, conclusions) so tightly. It seems possible that even the states we don’t seem to enjoy are sometimes clung to out of fear of unbecoming what we think we are.
Yet, for Sartre, consciousness in its purest state is spontaneous and autonomous; “nothing except consciousness can be the source of consciousness”. Likewise, a commonly purported verse from the Buddha being “there is no thinker only the thinking”. Sartre did, nevertheless, concede that in “I think” there is indeed an “I” that thinks. But, he proposes that it is an error to misinterpret this “I” for a “self that has been there all along”. It is only upon reflection in consciousness that an “I” is constituted. Therefore, we don’t discover a self through reflection, we create a self by reflecting on experience. If we take any guidance from Sartre, the notion of “introspection” is an unreliable process as reflection always “affirms more than it knows”. Therefore, his conclusion is that we should attempt to return to the reliability of “instantaneous consciousness”, or in Buddhist terms “sense-consciousness”.
We can therefore conclude that the unreliable process of “thinking” takes up an “I” position. We can also entertain that in meditative practice, it is not the self that relinquishes thoughts (as it is often instructed in meditation guidance material) but the thinking that momentarily suspends its “I” position. A therapeutic event could, therefore, be the process of finding the ongoing freedom to relinquishing the “I” position in consciousness. It is unlikely that this becomes a permanent state but rather that this makes room to giving rise to renewed self-constituting moments? A therapy based on these ideas appreciates how we reconstitute a self in every given moment, encouraging a more nimble mental process.
“Do you think I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk” – Jean Paul Sartre
Not making objects of ourselves
Following on from phenomenology, Existential Psychoanalysis attempts to understand consciousness as an experience, from the inside out, rather than explain it as a thing from the outside in. Our “sense of self” is considered to be a part of this experience rather than an objective thing to be accurately known and from which we reliably experience the world. A primary aim of Existential Psychoanalysis is, therefore, not to treat people as mere things. Taken even further, time, space and consciousness are not the containers of who we are. Rather, we are manifestations of time, space, and consciousness. We are time, form and consciousness busy happening. Existential Psychoanalysis’s interest is not limited to intrapsychic processes (the things that go on in our heads) and does not take for granted that the models we have for how consciousness is structured tangibly exist because consciousness cannot be understood from some objective external viewpoint. Not only does an existential approach treat these models (for example, of consciousness and unconsciousness, or ego and superego) with caution, its interest extends beyond the notion of a mind to an interest in how the world is given to us in consciousness, and an understanding of the encounter between our being and the world from which it manifests. What happens, in a continuous flow of fragmented moments, when the surface of our being makes contact with a world? Taken a step further, from an Existential perspective, the beauty of consciousness is that it allows us some intervention in our own existence: we are not just amoebas floating in an indifferent universe and we are not purely at the mercy of our own drives and supposedly unconscious processes. It is with this in mind that we turn to Secular Buddhist methods of meditation as a means of discovering how the world is given to us in consciousness (explored further in Day 3).
Letting go of what?
When it comes to mediation, there seems to be a misconception that it is a means of “clearing your mind of all thoughts”. It seems possible that the attitude of an “I” that lets go of a thought will simply serve to solidify this “I” by keeping it vigilant to the threat of new “distracting” thoughts. This is a potential language trap that much of modern Buddhist teachings fall into. But if we return to some of the original teachings, as already mentioned there is no thought without a thinker and no thinker without thoughts. Both thinker and thought are simultaneously arising events. It is more likely that the meditation is about relinquishing the “I” position taken up in response to an event/experience/thought than relinquishing the thought itself. In Buddhist terms this requires an attitude of “equanimity” towards all of experience.
This brings us back to Husserl’s basic premise: that consciousness is always a consciousness of something, what became known as “intentionality”, highlighting that experience is always directed towards things in the world. Building on this, he pointed out how we develop a “natural attitude” towards experience whereby we readily accept the “givenness” of the world around us as we encounter it. We have a tendency to include our “self” and the selves of others as these actual objects (an idea elaborated on by Sartre and his notion of the “Gaze”).
The main concern here is that in order to deal with the inherent emptiness of consciousness we make objects of ourselves. We do this through clinging to our own thoughts and ideas. This tends to lead to an increasingly rigid, anxious and inflexible response to experience. The therapeutics of meditation is in relinquishing a fixed I position towards experience. Put simply, when I say “this is who I am” I take up a rigid position and become the sum of my responses to experience.
An exercise in not making an object of the “self”:
Think of an experience you are having or have recently had. Think of the response or reaction you have had to that experience. Now think of the “I” position (your beliefs about yourself, your wishes for yourself, the things you are avoiding for yourself) in relation to this response to the experience. Try and suspend any beliefs you have about yourself, relinquish the wishes you have for yourself or try and embrace the things you are avoiding in relation to this experience – how does this leave you feeling? Do any other options become available to you?
Can you think of when you most vividly experienced yourself as the object of someone else’s consciousness? When they decided for you who or how you should be? Perhaps a parent, a spouse or a friend deciding for you what is best. Can you think of the effect it had on you? Can you think of the categories you are in the habit of identifying with mother/father/lover/professional/son/daughter…this or that… kind of person? Can you think of the script these identities come with of who and how you should be? When are these categories experienced as helpful? When are these categories experienced as limiting?
Can you think of a time when you might have treated someone as an object within consciousness? In other words, when you lost sight of the fact that they are having an experience of their own. Perhaps you decided for them what they should or should not be thinking or doing? How often do we start a well-intended sentence with “don’t you think you should…” or “why don’t you….”? Or, when you simply presumed that you know best for them or better than them? Can you imagine how this might rob them of a sense of agency? Taken even further, can you think of a time when you might have treated someone as if they where there for nothing but your own utility? Think of how we so often tend to treat shop attendants. How often do we fully appreciate that there is another consciousness looking out at as (in all sentient beings) having an experience?
