On Being “no-thing-ness” (Day4/5)

Mind as Relational

It unlikely that we emerge from the womb with a distinct sense of self. Rather, we are born crying-feeding-defecating blobs, with no sense of what is me and what is not me. A psychoanalytic premise is that it is through the process of soothing and frustrating of our basic needs that we begin to get a sense of self. An oversimplified model would be: I experience a discomfort that I don’t yet register as “hunger” (as I have no language for it) but it has me instinctively crying; a breast arrives in response to this cry and momentarily soothes this discomfort; the breast disappears (or doesn’t arrive back in time) and my need for soothing is frustrated. As the story goes, this process of soothing and frustrating my needs has me realising that I and the breast are distinct entities. Ideally, as I grow up, I realise that this breast is in fact attached to another person. This human, my caregiver, is not only essential to my survival but shapes how I experience myself: it is through my significant caregivers’ eyes that I begin to imagine myself, not only does my physical and emotional development rely on the extent to which they meet my needs, but I begin to imagine what they need from me. As my circle of significant others in my life increases, they become internalised “voices” that inform how I relate to an idea of my “self”. The self is, therefore, not just a first-person experience but a process of imagining ourselves from the outside in, through the eyes of others. What this translates into is that I know that I exist through the “other”. A baby girl cries, and she is given a bottle, legitimating her hunger. Later in her life, her father throws her a ball and he jumps up and down gleefully when she manages to catch it, demonstrating that she has succeeded in the task. We do not exist in isolation. Our minds develop mostly through interaction. And yet, we are always somewhat alone in our experience.

This developmental process is of particular importance to Psychoanalysis. For Lacan, for instance, the child is born premature, “at sea” in its own helplessness. At first, the child cannot even control its own movements and there is a dis-unity to its entire sensory experience. She can only experience the world and herself in fragments – in “part objects” (Kemp, 2006). It is proposed that from about six months the child enters a “mirror stage” – the stage in which she attempts to create an image of herself. The only thing that child has to go by is to try and resolve her “dis-unity” in identifying for an “other” (the primary caregiver). In Psychoanalytic terms, this sense of self that is lacking unity is known as the “primordial ego” – a feeling of emptiness, lack or alienation that the development of an ego (or attempt at a unified sense of self) never fully resolves. This unresolved lack is what gives rise to desire (or, in Buddhist terms, craving). For Lacan “mankind is doomed to a state that is forever split, alienated, castrated, narcissistic and destined to seek completion in the other, through desire.”  What this means is that a pervasive sense of unease exists for even the most well-functioning persons.  The recognition of this unease is central to Buddhist philosophy.

The chief tension between Buddhism and Psychoanalysis is that Buddhism (at least certain interpretations of it) proposes a relinquishing, whereas Psychoanalysis (for Lacan, at least) our desire can never be fulfilled, unity is never achieved, we are doomed to an endless seeking. Another interpretation of Buddhism, however, is not to relinquish desire, but to fully enter into it – not only the desire but the “pregnant emptiness” (to use Mark Epstein’s term) from which desire is born.

At first glance, it is a pretty bleak and contradictory picture that is being painted. Although my desire has me forever seeking unity with an “other”, I am ultimately alone (in that my experience is unknowable and not entirely articulatable to you) and simultaneously with others (I can never experience myself entirely in isolation, I can only know myself through you). “The fundamental delusion of humanity”, Master Yasutani Roshi points out “is to suppose that I am here and you are out there”. In Buddhism, the illusion of separateness lies at the heart of human’s struggle. Therefore, when I sit on a cushion I inevitably confront the interactive nature of my own being – the constant dialogue of all the voices that have been internalised during my life and, simultaneously, my own sense of alienation and isolation (even from any direct sense of a coherent and consistent self).

What is proposed here is that the only reliable aspect of our being (the focus of the therapeutic approach I wish to develop) is not so much a consistent sense of self, a fixed thing that can be discovered, but the capacity for awareness. When we start to pay some attention to our capacity for awareness, we notice that it is the one relatively pervasive quality to being human, even in Dreamless sleep (the closest we perhaps come to not interfering with or distorting our own existence) there is a form of subtle awareness that exists (see Evan Thompson). Despite this contradictory existence (aloneness with others) Buddhism proposes that we need to be weary of the ways in which we reify illusions of separateness. In our psychologised culture, we can easily fall into language traps of “othering” experience. For instance, when we talk about people as “addicts” we feed the assumption that they are “those people” defined by “that condition”. Even though Sartre might argue that there is no true essence to us as humans, for Buddhism, there remains something common to human experience: we all seem prone to similar tendencies – cravings, aversions, and clinging; and there is a particularly quality to consciousness that is luminous and insightful, accessible to all of us. However, the way consciousness is structured, especially through its mediation by language, I could perhaps never truly know your experience or fully understand why you do what you do and, at the same time, I cannot ignore our interconnectedness. Not only is your consciousness completely other to me, but even my own consciousness will never achieve a full grasp of my experience and what (or who) I am. What Buddhism calls Dukkha is, therefore, mostly likely linked to an infinite feeling of “otherness”. Yet, I am because you are.

R.D. Laing was of the opinion that we are afraid of truly experiencing our own minds (and each other).  We are petrified of our capacity for awareness and, therefore, we live mostly in a state of alienation from or denial of what we truly are.  We are only interested in finding out just enough to get by, to go through the motions of our ordinary, automated, lives.  Rather than labeling other people’s experiences, he was more inclined to enter as deeply as possible into understanding the conditions of another person’s experience.  Following this phenomenological attitude, Existential Psychoanalysis assumes that what we refer to as “mind” is not a self-governed thing that I possess and try to gain some kind of control over, but an ongoing relational event: between consciousness and world, and between consciousness and another consciousnesses.  From this perspective, it is proposed that the consciousness of the “other” poses both a problem and a solution:  Sartre elucidated how the consciousness of an “other”, as experiencing subject, is problematic for my own consciousness.  In encountering another consciousness, I am no longer the organising centre of my own universe – I encounter another consciousness which I can never quite reduce to an object in the world but that, at the same time, uses the same objects as me to organise its own world.  I am, therefore, forever at risk of being reduced to an object in the other’s consciousness.  However, as the contemporary philosopher Wilfried Ver Ecke illustrates, the gaze of the other is not entirely problematic – although the “look” of the other might leave me vulnerable to objectification (and therefore degrees of shame) at the same time (especially in our childhood development and, perhaps, other relationships such as therapy) we depend on this organising other to help us mediate our own subjectivity (for example, to develop a sense of justifiability for existing in the world).  The gaze of the other is usually objectifying but it can be affirming and it can facilitate agency and change.  In terms of what constitutes a therapeutic encounter, I am interested in how we might avoid an objectifying gaze and cultivate a more facilitative gaze (when we refer to the gaze here, we are obviously not just talking about the conventional understanding of visual gaze but the gaze in all the senses involved in encountering another, including how I hold the other in my imagination).  As I can never truly know the consciousness (or experience) of another, as a therapist I must constantly imagine what your experience is.  This is a great responsibility, and I must approach it with caution.  I have found that diagnostic (or any dogmatic kind of thinking) is not a very helpful form of imagination.  The challenge, therefore, is how to hold a person in regard without objectifying them.  This is something that we will explore further (see Levinas).

The role of therapy and psychoanalysis

The word “analysis” has its origins in “breaking apart” of something into its constituent parts. I don’t think that it is entirely uncommon for clients of conventional psychoanalysis to feel somewhat broken down or taken apart by the analytic process. I certainly felt this way, even during my training, being broken into constituent pieces. I can recall leaving my psychoanalytic lectures feeling particularly scrutinised rather than encouraged. Even my own clients tell me that I can sometimes be “brutal”. I think that it is important for a therapist to be as honest as possible. As Nietzsche declared in Beyond Good and Evil, ““The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.” But this dismantling of our barriers of denial is a delicate process that should be done in a spirit of care and in solidarity with the client’s own will. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for Psychological and Psychoanalytic literature to speak of the psych or the person with the assumption that they can be broken down into working parts. There is, however, an Existentialist move through works as Sartre and Heidegger (and those that followed, such as Boss and Binswanger) towards a contemplation (rather than analysis) of our “being in the world”. What then can we call this? It can perhaps no longer even be called “analysis” and it is perhaps no longer an analysis of the psyche but a consideration of our being-in-relation-to-becoming. This will be the focus of our work here. From this perspective, the mind is an ongoing relational event rather than a thing and we should perhaps move our analytic focus away from the idea of an individual psyche to an appreciation of how we are in a constant relationship with our own thoughts, experiences, each other and the world.

Other than feeling like you are being broken down into separate parts, it is concerning that the therapeutic gaze tends to make objects of us; reifying the notion of a fixed self, especially through categories of this or that kind of person, interpreting the meaning of our lives through the notion of symptoms. Taking inspiration form Laing, the Hungarian therapist, Andrew Feldmar, describes how the original meaning of the word “therapy” was to “attend to” or to “let be”. The therapist’s job could, therefore, be understood as a return to this original meaning – to let be, to meet the person where they are at. What if therapy should rather be an invitation to be what we are? What if experiences such as anxiety, melancholia, emptiness, isolation, obsession, addictive cravings, and our aversions are common-place responses to the ontological insecurity that comes standard with our own existence (exacerbated by life trauma and love gone wrong), rather than illness processes in minds that have supposedly gone wrong?

The conditions of experience

The Buddhist claim that separateness is an illusions is supported by their appreciation of “conditional arising” – nothing can be separated from the conditions from which it arose. According to Stephen Batchelor, it is accepted in all schools of Buddhism that “whatever is born has arisen from a cause” and that “something that is whole has been made up of parts” which implies that “all things depend on each other”. There are also specific and unavoidable causal factors that are emphasised in Buddhism: the fact that we are born and that we will inevitably die, are key conditions to be considered. Hence the underlying Existential flavour to Buddhism. At the very least, we are born into a world where our senses make contact with a reality that immediately gives rise to an experience. This experience then gives rise to craving, aversion or clinging – known as “tahna”. The extent to which we might inherently avoid, seek out, or cling to an experience contributes further to the already inevitable “unsatisfactoriness” of our experience (the disunity described earlier). Buddhism proposes that bringing conscious awareness to this process – of how we hanker on to some experience and evade other experiences – helps mitigate the perpetuation of ignorance and suffering. When we sit on a cushion, we are inevitably confronting the inevitable arising of this “tahna”.

It is important to note here that the notion of conditional arising should not be understood in simple behavioural psychology terms. It is not a mere cause-and-effect relationships or stimulus-response psychology. Albeit that the “effects” are entirely dependent on the “causes”; the “causes” are also dependant on the “effects”. There is no “cause” without its “effect”. It is perhaps better, then, to call it “interdependent arsing” – a simultaneous event, rather than a linear event. There is a common causal moto in psychology: “No behaviour is repeated unless it serves a function”. Curiously, that function doesn’t have to necessarily be positive or make logical sense. We perpetuate our own suffering in more ways than we would like to admit. “Don’t fall in love with your suffering” warns Slavoj Zizek, “Never assume that your suffering is proof of your authenticity. Renunciation of pleasure can easily turn into the pleasure of renunciation itself.” We often take great comfort in the discomfort of our own “symptoms”. Even the Buddhist path can easily become “the pleasure of renunciation itself” (yet another craving) when what it should arguably be is the preparedness for accountability for how we respond to an increasing awareness of the facticity of our own existence. South African musical genius, Chris Letcher, sings “The world has done things to you, but you have done more to yourself.” Vipassana (insight-based meditation) can be a means through which we find the meeting place between what the world has done to us and what we do to ourselves. It is, ultimately, a treatment model for ignorance and a readiness to address how we react to our own ontological insecurity.

Samsara

I may find that, regardless of how much I do or do not achieve in my life, I am plagued by a vague, free-floating, feeling of perpetual inadequacy. Perhaps this was first caused by how my father used to speak to me when the expectations that he had of me were not met. He needed me to be a certain kind of boy, which I was not. He was harsher than he was encouraging. Out of fear of this harshness I would shrink away from experiences rather than try and explore them in my own way. This gave rise to a deeply engrained pattern of withdrawal that manifested in a shyness about being in the world. This very quickly settled into a dreamy, disengaged, inertia (I can still slip into that inert state at even the whiff of disapproval or disappointment in myself). In this way, a cycle is created that starts with: 1) a vague feeling of inadequacy; 2) giving rise over time to a pattern of inertia; 3) leaving me feeling like I am not living up to my own expectations; 4) which compels me to further feelings of inertia; and therefore 5) posing the risk that self-expression continues to become less and less likely. The outcome is what psychology calls a “lack of self-efficacy”. It makes it difficult to have courage to be spontaneously and authentically in the world and more likely to take refuge in “bad faiths” (a concept introduced by Sartre that we will elaborate on) or familiar patterns of behaviour.

What if these thinking-feeling patterns are the true Samsara, the real cycles of suffering? When we are caught up in cycles like this for long enough, we feel stuck, we lose hope, it starts to feel like we don’t have a solution. What is depression other than a loss of hope? And, how do we break these stubborn cycles of suffering? As my therapist once said to me, “Jason, stop doing what you have always done and do the thing you don’t know how to do”. But, it is often in these moments, when we are caught up in these hopeless cycles, that our “tahna” escalates as our cravings are an attempt at escaping painful cycles. The cravings that manifest are not sins to be condemned but, more likely, an attempt (no matter how poor) at providing a necessary escape. At its worst, the need for escape will have us fantasising about our own ending. Suicide is not only in a final act. We are often complicit in a slow exit from our own lives, but most attempts at escaping (whether through substances, beliefs or behaviours) usually end up perpetuating the cycle of suffering, as Laing pointed out, of the “the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.”

We all have moments where we seem to sabotage our own lives in attempts to resolve our perpetual suffering. Over time we can become deeply at odds with who we think we are or where we are at in our lives. It is important to catch ourselves out; to notice the ways in which we abandon ourselves. Novelist, Daniel Stern wrote:
Everywhere there were people living out their lives using aspects of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in short, the one continuous, every-day, ever-present problem of living. It is a question of degree. I’d seen them in all varying stages of development and despair. The failed lawyer, the cynical doctor, the depressed housewife, the angry teen-ager…all of mankind engaged in the massive conspiracy against their own lives that is their daily activity.

In an attempt to end our own personal samsara, to escape the agony of our own perpetually unsatisfied longings, we all have a propensity to commit to a slow unofficial suicide through being at odds with ourselves, and our longings, just going through the motions of everyday activity. We do not live the lives we could be living. We gradually shrink away from what we might truly desire. “There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that”.

Through meditation we are committing to bringing consciousness to these perpetual cycles. We are committing to the courage to enter into our own longings more deeply and discover the conditions from which they arise. Entering into longings that are inevitably never fully met can leave us feeling more alone and empty than ever. However, as Mark Epstein puts it, this empty feeling is a “pregnant emptiness”. He encourages that, “Longing, fully felt, carries us to belonging. The more times we traverse this path — feeling the loneliness or craving, and inhabiting its immensity — the more the longing for love becomes a gateway into love itself.” What if it is not about relinquishing our desires but about fully entering into them?

Navigating our way through Samsara (as habitual cycle):

It might help us to navigate our way through these habitual cycles by looking at a Buddhist psychology (story) of how these cycles of thought might typically manifest:

• Habitual thought stirs at a subtle, preconscious level.
• There is an underlying reaction to this stirring, prior to it being fully conscious.
• In the moment of becoming aware of these thoughts (that are now embedded in further reactions or thoughts) I am most likely to identify with these thoughts.
• This leads to several consequences, fuelled by tahna: acting on them; dwelling on them; embellishing them; opposing them; attempting to resolve them…
• I act on this and my habitual tendencies are strengthened.

The past arrives in the present

The analytic traditions of Western psychology may be at risk of overemphasising how our lives are shaped by our childhoods but, from a meditator’s perspective: the past is relevant as far as it manifests in the present. It is as if there are these rabbit holes in our minds that open us up to feelings and mind states from our pasts. The solution does not necessarily lie in trying to go back into the past, but in recognising the past when it arrives in the present. How the past stays relevant in our present is through the ongoing momentum of these cycles. My father is long dead, but he stays alive in me, in good and bad ways, but especially through the habitual cycle of feeling inadequate. As Don Maclennan’s poem, Grieving highlights:

Why do we persist inhabiting old rooms
in houses where we grew to size,
enacting dramas in the attic or the music room
with its dusty bookcases and faulty piano?
You’d think our greatest gift was consciousness,
something to hold us cleanly in the here and now.
But you have grown to size inside me –
that’s why losing you hurts so much.

The houses where we grew to size have grown to size within us. My pattern of withdrawal was born out of a relationship in my past and it will reaffirm itself in the relationships in my present. My father is long gone, but his impact on my life can sometimes manifest in how I perceive a moment. The only remedy is to be present to and embracing of this.

Before the world told you who you are

I was not born feeling inadequate, experiences I had in relationship with others invited feelings of inadequacy into my life. Sartre argued that there was no true essence to (wo)man, we invent this essence through our actions, defining what it means to exist. Buddhism pays attention to how we react to our own “facticity” (the fact that we exist in the first place). It is an attempt to return to the “pregnant emptiness” of our existence. “Can you remember who you were,” Charles Bukowski asks, “before the world told you who you should be?”

There is a plethora of possible mind states between our propensity for suffering and joy. From the moment we come into the world, there are many conditions that we might experience that eventually give rise to relatively fixed states that we see as “just who we are”. Laing seemed to believe that every mind state we entered into was a kind performance of who we are. He encouraged a curiosity in these various states of mind, rather than a fear for them. He believed in proving to ourselves that we had some freedom in moving between these states. It is through meditative practice that we hope to open ourselves up to being curious about the possibilities of human consciousness.

If we look at this idea of cycles of thought and behaviour discussed earlier, then “Depression” is the effect, not the cause. To say I can’t get out of bed in the mornings because I am depressed is a description of the “effect” and not the “cause”. To have true insight, we need to be able to bear witness to the interdependent arising of depression. Whether the terms Bipolar, Depression or Borderline are helpful terms to summarise what I am experiencing or not, they should not be mistaken for a full understanding. True understanding lies in understanding the conditions through which my “symptoms” arose, through noticing the arising of these conditions in the moment. We cannot get away from the fact that these conditions, that we are in the habit of speaking about as if they exist in some concrete form within us, are actually “relational” in origin: their origins are between people, rather than within the person. Our capacity for thinking and experiencing has developed through relationships, and so, my depression does not manifest “in” me, it manifests “between” me and the world: as a result of my experience of it. Depression is often, for example, the result of the experience of oppression that keeps us feeling stuck and hopeless. You can’t imagine how many people feel oppressed by the subtle dynamics in the average family system.

For Laing, the job of the therapist was not to do things to the patient, but to “let be”. This is perhaps true for all relationships: we struggle to “let be” and rather want to shape each other according to our own desires. The work of an Existential therapist is to hold off on interpretation, avoid telling you how to live your life, and find delight in who you are (including everything you could be). We bring this attitude to meditation, through an attitude of “equanimity”, allowing as to be with things as they are. The great philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, declared in Philosophical Investigations (the work that he hoped would put an end to philosophy): “Don’t think, but look!”; “Only describe, don’t explain.” The moment we describe something, even to ourselves, we change it. Mark Epstein talks about his first, disappointing, encounter with psychotherapy as arriving with the hope of an “experience” and coming away with only an “explanation”. What we are doing when we are meditating is giving way to direct experience, rather than settling for explanations that alienate us from the vitality of the moment. When we practice Vipassana, we open ourselves to experiencing what is, rather than living through ideas of who and how we should be. We explore the freedom of choosing what to do with what our existence, so far, has done to us. We put away the answers and allow ourselves to become questions to ourselves.