Jason Ross

PhD Philosophy & Psychoanalysis

Tag: phenomenology

On Being “no-thing-ness” (Day4/5)

June 11, 2023 /

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).

My Nurse and I, by Frida Kahlo

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?

Laing meditating

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.

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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