Jason Ross

PhD Philosophy & Psychoanalysis

Tag: Emoyeni

On being “no-thing-ness” (Day 3/5)

April 3, 2023 /

The Psychology of meditation

Ultimately, through a meditative approach to analysis, we are hoping for a different kind of insight. We are hoping for something more felt and instantaneous in consciousness, something that words can only try and make room for but that cannot be found in words themselves, but in the pauses between them. This is a shift away from the tendency to name, explain and pathologize our struggles as conditions of a self-like-structure. It is an invitation into an appreciation of the self as an unfolding process in relationship to a world it is embedded in.

For an Existential Phenomenologist, the task of the philosopher is to skeptically enter her own stream of consciousness and describe what she finds there. This fits neatly with the ambitions of insight-based meditation or Vipassana and the intention of “being with what is, no matter what it is”. Even though Irvin Yalom (esteemed Existential Psychotherapist) is not a meditator he prescribes solitude, silence, time, and freedom from distractions, as the ultimate therapeutic method. However, as Montaigne might have proposed, solitude without method can be at best fruitless and at worst dangerous. Traditional Buddhist methods of solitude can also be rather mentally destabilising for the average Westerner. Solitude does not even have to mean being completely cut off from other people or our everyday lives. Solitude (as an attitude) can simply be a method of making it possible to attend to what is really going on, right here and now. This could be awareness of a particular anxiety; a strong craving; or ways in which we may be feeling relatively stuck or depressed. Vipassana offers us a specific way of being aware of these states of mind, in their moment to moment unfolding, saving us from being overly swept away by them. Although it can be seen as a kind of training exercise, this way of being in the moment does not only apply to when we are formerly sitting on a meditation cushion. Ultimately, it is a means of practicing coming to terms with what is really going on and what it means to be alive.

In a recent interview with Trevor Noah, Jim Carey summarises existence as “None of this is real and all of it is true.” When it comes to thought and emotions, how do we distinguish what feels real from what is true? Vipassana offers a method for this; a systematic means of attempting to see things as they arise, or as the phenomenologist would say – as they are given to us in consciousness.

The origins of Mindfulness

Vipassana emerged out of Southeast Asian countries, such as Burma. Due to increasing contact with the West there was a need to preserve aspects of their own culture, therefore returning to some of their own original teachings. Simultaneously, there was a growing interest from some Westerners (partly brought on by the influence of psychedelics) in exploring what human consciousness was all about. Western curiosity and distilled Buddhist teachings found a meeting place in these countries. Vipassana is now widely considered by many Buddhist teachers as foundational to meditation and is particularly secular in its focus. Vipassana is sometimes knows as “insight-based meditation” but in the western world it has become popularised as “mindfulness”.

The Basic Method

The basic method is to start with finding calm. This is followed by the main task – sustained attention to the “present moment”. From this perspective, access to the “present moment” lies in our sensorial experience. Most typically we rest our attention on either our breath or sound. These are known as meditation “supports” or “anchors”. The anchor you choose can have a slightly different impact on your experience, each with its own challenges and benefits. Following your breath tends to help you achieve calm, it puts you in touch with our own facticity (the fact that you are in a living breathing body) and it is a sign of life that is unfolding in the moment. However, even though breathing happens automatically, we have the ability to manipulate our breath which can get in the way of an attitude of being with things as they are. Allowing your attention to rest on the sounds around you can sometimes be a bit more difficult to access, but sound is truly a phenomenon of this moment. Sounds tend to arise and fall much like thoughts do and attention to this coming and going can help one ease into a meditative attitude. Our tendency, however, is to name and embellish the sounds, make more of them then what is actually there.

The objective is to have no objective, to try and inhabit a sense that there is nothing to be done and nothing to be achieved. We spend most of our day in a doing, thinking, achieving mindset. It is often taught that one should imagine you had two minds, one for thinking and one for observing and it is the observing mind that you want to enter into. My phenomenological critique is that it is unlikely that there is an observer behind consciousness from which we experience the world. It is, nevertheless, fascinating that there is a faculty of consciousness that takes on this experiencing role – the reflective awareness that an experience is being had. We won’t go into this now but there are likely to be many cognitive faculties involved here, including working memory. However, what seems to make room for this ability to observe rather than become swept away in participation is an attitude of “impartiality”. Part of this artistry lies in resting our attention on our sensory experience “effortlessly”. The most common challenge is that we try too hard.

 

The inevitable arising

What you will experience is the inevitable arising of thoughts. Thoughts simply stir up of their own accord. This is not thinking. Thinking then occurs in how we engage in these original stirrings in the mind. It is remarkable to notice just how attached we are to our own thoughts and thinking. The task from here is perplexingly simple – when you realise that you have been swept away by your own thinking, you notice this, where you mind has taken you, and you gently bring yourself back to the sensory support. This helps us achieve a stance of impartiality we are hoping to develop. It is important to note here that the task is not to achieve a state of no thought: thoughts and thinking are inevitable, but the Buddhist attitude is that “thoughts in themselves have no power”.

As we continually bring ourselves back to the anchor, we start to make room for a clearer view of things as they are, that is less clouded by our own reactivity. As we become more rooted in a stance of being able to observe ourselves with impartiality, we get an increasing sense of “things as they are”. Over time, this gives rise to a more spontaneous kind of insight. In other words, this is not a cerebral kind of insight but a simple seeing and accepting things for what they are. Over time, regular practice allows for a clarity of mind that, ironically, cannot be the achieved through striving to achieve it. Although the initial practice is to continually bring yourself back to the meditation support, training sustained attention, practitioners like Stephen Batchelor promote a progression to attending to all that is given to us in consciousness, thoughts included. It is, therefore, important not to enter into a wrestling match with your own thoughts but to reach a point where you can attend to their naturally arising as if they were a passing sensation. The outcome is necessarily about achieving a state of bliss or calm, but rather practicing being with things as they are without becoming overly reactive, making room for a quality of attention to experience that helps brings insight. This is not easily achieved at first and so what follows are a few basic suggestions drawn mostly from Stephen Batchelor.

 

Basic steps to Vipassana

Attending
Simply bring your awareness to your own breath. Actively using your breath to achieve a sense of calm in your body. Taking deep, deliberate breaths at first. Begin to follow the breath all the way in and all the way out. Perhaps taking special note of the pause between breaths. Allow the sensation of your breath to bring attention to the fact that you are sitting here in a living breathing body, pinned to the world by gravity. When you are ready, allow your breath to return to its natural rhythm. Try not to interfere with the breath any longer. Simply notice how your body breaths, on its own accord. This is where we can begin to practice approaching experience as an impartial witness, entering into the capacity to experience yourself experiencing. Let your attention come to rest on your breath. See if you can allow your attention to ride your breath all the way in and all the way out.

 

Arising

Even though you are attending to your breath. It is simply your anchor. You can still cultivate an openness to whatever is going on in this very moment: bodily sensations; the natural and inevitable arsing of thoughts; underlying feelings or attitudes (even towards yourself); the sounds of life around you. It is remarkable how thoughts inevitably arise as brought in from some deeper current stirring in the mind. It is difficult to sense their moment of origination and by the time we know they have arrived, we are usually already caught up in them: usually taking the form of fantasies about the future or rehearsals of the past. This is also where our Ahamkara (“self-making”) becomes most obvious through our preferences of like – don’t like; want – don’t want; me – not me: an ongoing tendency of grasping and aversion. But, when you find yourself lost in thoughts and thinking, you simply notice that where you have ended up, what you are doing there, perhaps even how you get there and remind yourself that you can anchor back into the sensory support. In this way the sensory experience (usually your own breath or the sounds around you) serves as a reference point for the what is going on here and now. This is not so much about clearing your mind of all thoughts but in gaining perspective on your own experience and, especially, on how thoughts and thinking colour that experience. The problem is not the thoughts in themselves but how we involve a self in these thoughts. A good term for this is reactivity.

 

Reactivity

Thoughts arise seemingly out of nowhere. They don’t seem to require much conscious involvement from us in their initial arising. But as they arise, we become more and more involved in them. There are many habitual ways in which we become involved in them. Some unique to ourselves but, overall, we seem to have many shared tendencies (especially within any given culture). For example, we make constant comparisons – “is this good or bad” and react accordingly through either clinging on to that which we like and showing aversion for that which we don’t. This seems obvious and harmless but it is the foundation of the “I” position we discussed in Day 2. Not only do we establish an “I” but when we judge these thoughts as good or bad we judge ourselves for thinking them. The intention is to participate as little as possible in the arising of thoughts as we take note of the shape and shaping of these thoughts. Over time, this gradually introduces us to the reactive nature of our minds. The hope is to move away from habitual reactions to more conscious responsiveness. Much like the relation between dreaming and lucid dreaming – there is a quality of awareness that we would like to introduce that enables us to participate more effectively in our own lives. The basic premise is that unnecessary suffering is caused by attempts at escaping things as they are. From this perspective, the therapeutic outcome is a facilitation of “embracing the totality of experience” to use a phrase by Stephen Batchelor. Perhaps following from his interest in Buddhism, R.D. Laing suggested that:

“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain. ”

 

Sati Sampajanna

What we call “mindfulness” in the West refers to the Sanskrit term Sati Sampajanna which can be translated to “remember the present”. In order to “remember the present”, we continually bring ourselves back to the meditative support: something to hold us in the here and now. It is our senses that give us the most reliable access to the present, but they can also serve a place of refuge from how incessantly restless and reactive our minds are. If we break this term down – to remember the present – it may not just be about being in the moment (as is commonly understood) but in re-collecting ourselves around this moment. It would be almost impossible to function only in this moment and only from moment to moment. Much of life requires an anticipation of the future. It may even be possible to hide from life in the present moment. The objective here is, therefore, much more therapeutically minded – to use the reminder of the sensuous immediacy of what is happening here and now to help prevent us getting overly consumed by neurotic and delusional preoccupations with past and future. The preservation of a “self”, the “I” position that arises in relation to thoughts and experience seems instrumental in perpetuating our neuroses and delusions.

 

Spaciousness

Over time, what we intend to cultivate is a certain openness or spaciousness where the habitual patterns of the mind tend to lose their momentum. This may allow for a bit more freedom from our own reactivity to what we believe is going on in the here and now (often clouded by past ideas and experiences). This is where ideas about our “self” become less fixed and where we might find it a bit easier to “be with what is”. This also requires the practice of letting go of attachment to our thoughts, feelings, aversions, and cravings. The present moment, therefore, serves to hold us as we let go of the fixed grasp we have on an ”I” position (this is me, this is mine) in relation to experience. Experienced meditators often describe this as a feeling of spaciousness.

Coming to terms with our habitual tendencies:

1) What are particularly habitual thoughts you may be having at the moment?
2) What kind of reaction do you have to these thoughts?
3) What “I” position is involved in these thoughts?
For example: 1) “Did I leave the stove on?” 2) “The house is going to burn down” 3) “I am such an idiot, I always ruin things”.

Can you see how, when the self takes up a certain position towards a thought or experience, there is usually some sort of identity attached to this position – “I am such an idiot”. There is usually also a theme or story in your life that form part of this identity formation – “I always ruin things”. This identity and these themes tend to inform what we anticipate about the future. But, what if we made room for something new?

On being “no-thing-ness” (Day2/5)

April 1, 2023 /

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.

Mervyn Croft guiding us to the Labyrinth

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?

 

 

On being “no-thing-ness” (Day 1/5)

March 26, 2023 /

An existential Buddhist analysis of the self as the “struggle to exist”

Day 1: A view on Self

(Day 1 of a retreat hosted at Emoyeni Retreat Centre, Mooi Nooi, South Africa)

 

This retreat considers an intersection between Existential Philosophy, Buddhism and Psychotherapy. It is based on the assumption that we all bring our own personal struggles with the “self” to a retreat setting in the hope that Buddhist practices may bring some transformation. The traditional Buddhist solution is that the self is an illusion. But, what does this mean for practical functioning in the everyday world. What I propose is that it is better to treat the self as a construction (an interdependent arising – to use Buddhist language) rather than a complete illusion. Ultimately, the “self” that we bring on retreat can be viewed as a “struggle to exist” that arises out of sensory contact with the world, giving rise to conscious experience that is then reflected upon (made sense of in consciousness). Conscious experience is opaque or transient and, therefore, uncertain, lacking or unsatisfactory. In response to this we either 1) enter into a struggle to make something solid and lasting out of experience (such as entering into a project of “having”), or 2) flee from the sensation of what it means to exist, taking refuge in alienating habits. The self can, therefore, be said to be a “struggle to exist”.

View from our comfortable stay at Emoyeni

What does it mean to have a “sense of self”? Is this a feeling? Is it an actual sensation? We all seem to have a felt sense of what it is like to exist. My sensation of self seems to be only accessible to me: I can never have direct access to yours, or you to mine. In the field of phenomenology this is probably best described as “hedonic tone”: a felt sense of what it means to exist on a sensory level that gives rise to the sensation of pleasure or pain. But, beyond this basic sensorial experience, what are we referring to when we talk about a “sense of self”? In a public address to the Spanish people, Leonard Cohen tells the story of how he found his voice:

It was only when he discovered the Spanish Poet, Lorca (even in translation) that he had a sense of permission to have a voice of his own: “It is not that I copied his voice, I would not dare, but he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice. That is, to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence”. This provides a succinct rendition of self: something that is “not fixed”, not a thing at all but a “voice” that “struggles for its own existence”. Similarly, for the Existential Psychoanalyst, the self is not a fixed thing brought into therapy to be successfully treated. The self is found at the place where consciousness and the world meet, in the struggle to comprehend what it means to exist. If psychotherapy is, therefore, an attempt to understand what it means to be human and the struggles that we face in response to our own existence, surely it should begin with an understanding of consciousness – our primary relation to the world? Therapy, much like poetry, serves as an attempt to give language to this juncture where consciousness meets a world. In this way, therapy finds a “self” that is not a fixed structure but a “voice” from which experience is articulated. The self is not a thing but an action, a relation and an articulation.

If Buddhism teaches a doctrine of “anatta”, or non-self, how is it even possible to function without a self? What are the therapeutic implications for having and not having a self? What role does the self play in functioning in the world? And, how would one function in the world without a self?

When we ask these kinds of questions, paying closer attention to the sense of self, we realise that it can be experienced in multiple ways. We have surely all had the sense of experiencing ourselves from the outside (in the third person) in a dream as if watching a scene of ourselves in a movie. Similarly, certain kinds of recall memory seem to involve this same third person perspective. Neurophenomenologist, Evan Thompson uses the phenomenon of dreaming as an illustration of how the sense of self takes on various forms in consciousness. In a conversation with Robert Wright in 2016, he equates mindfulness in waking with the lucidity of lucid dreaming while sleeping (and shows how neurologically these appear to be closer in brain states). Lucid dreaming being the kind of dreaming when you are aware that you are actually dreaming and, therefore, able to make conscious choices within the dream. When it comes to meditative practice, there is a certain quality to awareness that we are looking to cultivate that goes beyond just focused attention, a certain kind of quality of awareness of experience and relation to the self – much like the meta-awareness in lucid dreaming, it is the sense of experiencing yourself experiencing.

 

However, this poses some philosophical challenges, such as: when it comes to this kind of awareness, what is doing this observing? It is often conceived that this “observer”, or what cognitive science calls “meta-awareness”, is a separate self behind consciousness. In Western Philosophy this would be, for example, Husserl’s notion of the transcendent ego (a self that is behind consciousness) or in Upanishads (Hindu philosophy) the “true self” that can be discovered in pure consciousness. But, to what extent is this “meta-awareness” a construction (for example through memory) through which we piece together fragmented aspects of consciousness rather than a direct or immediate experience of consciousness itself? Or, is there a subtle and consistent level of awareness that is present in all states of consciousness (even deep dreamless sleep) and that maybe even survives death (as some Buddhist teachings would have us believe)? However, even though we cannot reduce the phenomenon of consciousness to firing of neurons (what has become known as the “hard problem” of consciousness) there is, as of yet, no scientific evidence that consciousness can exist independent of its neurological basis.

 

“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

My concern here is from a therapeutic perspective and is phenomenological. In other words, how can we to try and bracket our ideas about the world in order to go more directly into experience and discover what we find there. Therapy, much like Buddhism, is concerned with dealing with the illusions we are trapped within and freedom from the potential suffering they cause. From a phenomenological perspective, consciousness is all that we have. There is no Archimedean point from which we can stand outside of experience and witness the supposed Truth. Everything we know is given to us in consciousness, even our scientific conclusions are a creative outcome of conscious activity. Taken further, some might argue a panpsychist view – that the functioning and development of all living organisms within the cosmos involve some level of consciousness (awareness and response to existence). Nevertheless, consciousness, like the cosmos, is not easy to explore. Consciousness, like the cosmos, is a continuous and spontaneous eruption that appears to be self-organising and it does not appear that what we conceive of as a self is the actual origin of consciousness but rather the outcome of consciousness. As Sartre argued, the self is something that is constructed in consciousness within the act of reflecting upon experience. However, Evan Thompson argues that it is misleading to say that the self is a “illusion” (which is how it is commonly languaged in Buddhist teachings) but rather that it is a “construction”. It can also be argued that the construction of self within consciousness is essential to our functioning. In order to be effective in the world, to intervene in the events of our unfolding lives, we surely need to take up a position towards experience. This position towards experience, what we could call a “preference” (in its basic form as pleasure or pain, liking or disliking) are the grounds for such self-positioning (or perspective). It is, therefore, not so much this “I” position that we take towards experience that is the problem but the implications and ethics of this position. In other words, this “I” position (with ideas about what is “me” or “not me” and what is rightfully “mine”) takes on a certain understanding of the world, develops particular motivations based on this understanding of the world (and our place in it) and tends to cling on to this position. It is, therefore, not the tendency to take up this position that perhaps should be of central concern but the nature of the position that we take up and the ways in which we cling to it.

My courageous, yet small in stature, teenage son is playing club hockey against fully grown adults. He receives the ball and has at least two beastly men coming at him with sticks. His coach shouts “Back yourself, Sam!” It’s an interesting construction of self – that the self is something that can be self-backing. I probably spend a lot of time doing the same with clients in therapy – encouraging them to stand by their own needs and desires. This seems to be in direct contradiction with Buddhist teachings that encourage a relinquishment of desires. However, clients who have experienced deep enough shame in their lives can end up feeling apologetic for their own existence and live under a constant cloud of guilt-ridden anxiety, leaving them overly compelled to meet the needs of others in denial of their own. Such a tendency can leave them trapped in circumstances that perpetuate their trauma, tolerating circumstances that are harmful to them in the same ways that their original trauma was. Therapy is often, therefore, a process of constituting a solid enough sense of self (rather than dispelling it as an illusion) in order to gain a sense of agency that can lead to important changes. Severe trauma can also leave a person with an overly fragmented sense of self, making it difficult for them to function effectively in the world. Therapy in these circumstances is self-affirming rather than self-denying. I, therefore, ask the question of how therapy can provide some sense integration without supporting an overly rigid (and therefore fragile and defensive) sense of self? In terms of this the Buddhist psychiatrist, Mark Epstein, talks of an “unintegration” rather than a “disintegration”:

One of the most important tasks of adulthood is to discover, or rediscover, the ability to lose oneself. To do this we must understand the difference between unintegration and disintegration. The Chinese expression for orgasm, “having a high tide,” describes this difference quite effectively. In a high tide everything is floating, the self is submerged or dissolved, but it is not chaos. When we are afraid to relax the mind’s vigilance, however, we tend to equate this floating with drowning and we start to flounder. In this fear, we destroy our capacity to discover ourselves in a new way. We doom ourselves to a perpetual hardening of character, which we imagine is sanity but which comes to imprison us.

However, this does not account for the inevitable requirement for something to unify experiences within consciousness (otherwise all we would be left with are the fragments of “mind moments”). How, then, are we able to knit one moment to the next in a meaningful way? An example of the loss of this capacity being dementia. The real problem is not the unifying capacity of a sense of self but its egoic tendencies: the inclination to seek unity withing consciousness by seeking permanence, to have, and be in control. I believe that there is also value in being sympathetic to our self struggles without entering into a morbid romance with this self and its struggles. This is where Buddhism may have something to offer in terms of its concept of “metta” (compassion) and finds semblance with existentialists like Kierkegaard who saw “care” as the unifying factor in consciousness. To add to this, Heidegger claimed that “care” was the stamp of being human. Therefore, it is likely that a unifying aspect of consciousness can be shifted from “having” to “caring”. Such a shift, of care or compassion rather than having, moves us away from attempts to make something solid out of the self to a relationship with the self as an ongoing process of becoming.

“The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.”
― Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life

My proposal is that it is not the self, in itself, that is the problem but how this self is conceived (the beliefs we develop around it, such as the world owes me something, or how Social Darwinism promotes “survival of the fittest”) and the relationship we have with this self, that is the trouble. In Buddhist language, it is the cravings and aversions that manifest out of our relationship with self (an egoic relationship) that are problematic. It’s the clinging to the self and not the self, in it’s self, that is the problem. The therapeutic model I am proposing is an entertainment of the possibility of continually relinquishing and re-establishing a self-position in relationship to experience as a malleable and unfolding process of continual becoming.

In summary, thus far, I am proposing a meditative approach to the self that takes on a Satrean flavour, viewing the self is a forever incomplete project of achieving some unity, something solid out of the fleeting, inherently empty, moments of consciousness. As the existential psychotherapist Spinelli conceives of what we are as “that process-like flow of being-always-becoming”, rather than a fixed objective self that supposedly can and needs to be accurately known.

The self is ultimately a perspective on experience and it can therefore take on many forms: We can talk of an autobiographical self; a sensory self (even a bodily sense of self is a construction – we put together fragmented sensory experiences that can be grossly distorted); an observer self; a habitual self; and an imagined self, to name a few. However, what seems fundamental to the sense of self is that it is a “sense”. Everyone has a felt sense of what it is like to exist. This is a feeling that we have on a sensory level. After all, it is only through my senses that I experience the fact that I exist. As Merleau-Ponty put it in Phenomenology of Perception, “The body is our general medium for having a world”. I’ve been thinking more and more about this hedonic tone and the role that it plays in our struggles. I have also been thinking about how there is something deeply habitual even to this more immediate sense: how the sensation of the past has a way of lingering in the present. Do we ever get a sense of what is occurring in the instantaneous moment? Is experience only ever somewhat retrospective, as we catch the tail end of a sense of something lingering? Are we ever fully in the present? Even the coolness of the wind on my skin as I type out these words has a way of lingering after the moment. It is through that lingering that I seem to trace the moment backwards. If this is true about the wind on my skin, how might this be particularly true for our “sense of self”? The sense of self is surely, in part, a lingering sense of what it is that we are and a potentially always outdated one. This is why trauma is so damaging, it leaves a particularly lasting unpleasant sensation of, for example shame, fearfulness, or discontent that not only impacts the present but what we anticipate for the future. Whatever vague sense one is left with from the past, it makes it ever more difficult to experience our “self” afresh in the present or imagine ourselves different in the future. The past seems to have a way of lingering in the present, much like the coolness of the wind on skin that lingers beyond the moment. It is this lingering sense that a person arrives in therapy with and that they usually would like to shake off. When this lingering sense is unpleasant enough, forever hindering the potential sense of something new, it tends to morph into a desperate despondence, often leaving one with fantasies of our own ending as the only way out.

This doesn’t have to be a passive process: We are not just sensory receptive organisms at the mercy of experience. We make choices and these choices are self-constituting. From a Satrean perspective, to neglect to choose is an unwelcome version of non-self. To exist we must choose. We, therefore, carry great responsibility in everything that we do. As Sartre is famous for saying, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” This is not dissimilar from certain Buddhist views, in Understanding Our Mind: 50 Verses on Buddhist Psychology , Thich Nhat Hanh proclaims that “My actions are my only true belongings.”

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