Jason Ross

PhD Philosophy & Psychoanalysis

Tag: Sartre

Introducing Existential Analysis

September 7, 2024 /
Beyond Snake Oil: The anti-cure of Existential Practice

From the onset of my training in psychology, I had reservations about how psychology was being done. My English professors seemed to have a much better grip on an understanding of the human condition than my Psychology lecturers. Classes on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot seemed to say more about how we relate to our own existence than a lesson on the characteristics and proposed treatment for supposed conditions like bipolar disorder. By the time I was in my final year of master’s training in Psychology, I was asked to leave my internship because I continually challenged the efficacy of psychometric tests as the means for understanding a person, their struggles, and their response to their life circumstances. Fortunately, I had a very supportive supervisor who happened to be head of our master’s program and he helped me find a new placement straight away. I wanted to explore the art of therapeutic conversation, and I had romantic ideas about the “The talking cure”, but I also distrusted psychodynamics and psychoanalysis. I was concerned for how the psychoanalytic approach was overly focused on our early years and gave too much agency to the unconscious. The psychoanalyst seemed too stoic to be of any help and the process seemed intent on breaking the analysand apart. I believed Freud was dead and we should move on. I discovered Narrative Therapy, an approach that had developed under the influence of Michelle Foucault’s ideas, very critical of the psy-industry (psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis). As a methodology, Narrative Therapy was against the idea of therapist as gatekeeper to a client’s experience – the therapist job was not to interpret the client’s world for them. In this way, Narrative Therapy attempts to avoid the potential power differential between client and therapist by focusing on how the client languages their own experience. It considers the client as the authority and author in their own lives, respecting the language that the client uses to articulate their own problems. I found it helpful to see our lives in terms of stories and the therapy room became an editing suite for understanding and transforming these stories. To some extent, therapy became a resistance movement to the dominant stories imposed on us by society and even our own families, about who and how we should be.

I took this further, writing a thesis in Discursive Psychology, scrutinising the everyday language we use in constructing our reality. In philosophical terms, this put me on the side of structuralism and post-structuralism, exploring how we structure reality through language. This seemed like the appropriate skill for a psychologist to develop, language being the means of “treatment”. This, however, set me off on somewhat of a lonely path of attempting to carve out a different way of doing Psychology. I applied this approach in many contexts, including sexuality; illness and injury; neurological rehabilitation; addiction; trauma; and relationship therapy. More than a decade and a half later, Covid hit, and I printed the portraits of the thinkers I was finding most helpful at the time. It felt particularly lonely in this daunting time to be a therapist. I stuck the portraits above my desk and as I looked up at them, I realised that most of these figures – including R.D. Laing, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus – were existentially inclined. There was also the existential Buddhists, Stephen Batchelor, and the postmodern author, Jeanette Winterson, who wrote: “To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown”.

Just before covid hit, Fiona and I had attempted to turn our home into a retreat centre – a live-in therapy centre that moved away from the clinic as a setting for dealing with problems of living and feeling. As part of this project, I had started to merge ideas from Western Philosophy and Buddhism. My interest in Buddhism spanned back to the onset of my 20’s. During Covid I decided to formalise this thinking in the form of a PhD in Philosophy. I had come across a contemporary philosopher and psychoanalyst whose work I appreciated, Julie Reshe. A lecture of hers on Sado Masochism led me to the Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS).

As I began my studies with GCAS, I came to realise that the thinkers I had been exploring shared similar origins, Phenomenology (the study of experience from within experience), and some had translated this into a practice that could be called Existential Psychoanalysis. GCAS teaches Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, and I had the privilege of being exposed to contemporary thinkers and psychoanalysts like Jamieson Webster. I was very quickly seduced by Jamieson’s reading of Freud. It wasn’t so much Freud’s ideas but Jamieson’s intensity, the return to a deeply embodied practice of client and therapist being with each other in the almost inarticulatable struggles that we face. There was something deeply meditative about the approach. Jamieson and many others at GCAS favoured Lacan, a complicated language-based reading of Freud. Given my interest in how reality is constructed through language, I had often flirted with studying Lacan, but never had the courage to engage with his riddles. This gave me the chance to dabble in Lacan, even though I was drawn mostly to phenomenology and existentialism, and I even saw Lacan as a closet phenomenologist. For me, the important questions for us to start with was “how do we exist” and, from there, “how do we go on”.

I was appointed a super smart supervisor who held three doctorates, Prof Kevin Boileau. He knew so much and had many incredible ideas bursting out of him, more than he could write down in one lifetime and he had already written a lot. But I needed to develop my own ideas, my own way. I knew what I wanted to say, I just needed the time and the space to agonise with the words. Prof Boileau introduced me to a path that straddled the study of embodied experience (phenomenology) with an appreciation of how we function within a language (structuralism). In the end, I completed my PhD with a nudge and some inspiration from Julie Reshe herself. I wrote an exploration of a therapy that was against diagnosis and treatment. Using some ideas from Buddhist practice, I attempted to describe how to help people by being with them in their struggles, rather than acting upon them with a particular treatment methodology. It became somewhat of a study of consciousness and an account of how there is no “true self” behind consciousness, looking out at the world. It followed Sartre’s notion that “Existence precedes essence” – how we are in the world defines what we are. In this way, the “psych” fell away from “psychoanalysis”.

This has led me along a path of developing a practice more inclined towards Existential Analysis. Our struggles are not seen as individual pathos but as inherent aspect of how we exist in the world. It views our struggles, that we are in the habit of naming depression, anxiety, bi-polar, or addiction, as inherent to consciousness. These struggles are seen as responses to our lives, rather than conditions in the brain. It is not a practice that proclaims to tell people how they should live or what they should do with their lives, but brings a presence to your own experience and supports a courage with being with things as they manifest. Change is not something that we force but that we try and open up to, through giving contemplation to our responses, rather than giving in to our habitual reactions. Existential Analysis also involves an ethical stance towards our struggles: an appreciation of truth, responsibility and freedom.  In order to address our struggles with this kind of openness, resisting the impulse to try and “fix” and “get over” things, requires a certain courage, commitment and sufficient containment. The objective is not “cure” but finding ways of “being” in the world, in ways that feel most true to our own intentions. However, something needs to “hold” us as we allow ourselves to undo and redo ourselves in this way. Therapy becomes a constant process of relinquishing any grasp on a fixed idea of “who I am” or how things should be. For this reason, I have come to increasingly value commitment from both therapist and client to a weekly ceremony of connecting, the same day and time, for as long as we feel we need to, or for as long as the relationship lasts. In this way, we can really give our lives, the relationships it is made up of, and our experience of things sufficient care and attention. The therapy process becomes a lived-out experience of staying alert to things as they arise in our consciousness.

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.”

Buddhist Practice as Existential Therapy

November 3, 2020 /

Buddhism as an existential Practice

What if Buddhism could be seen as, essentially, an existential practice?  In other words, it asks questions like: “what is this thing that I am?”, “what is it that I am doing here?”, or, as Heidegger might have put it, “why am I even here at all?”.  From an existentialist perspective, the most interesting aspect of being human is the nature of consciousness: We experience the world in a way that we are able to be aware of the very fact that we are experiencing it.  This leads to complicated questions, such as: “What does it mean to be human?”; “Who or what in the end is doing the actual experiencing?”; and “What informs how we interpret the experiences we have?”  Our “way of being” in the world is particularly defined by our times.  As Heidegger suggests, we are thrown into a world not of our own making (especially the culture, language and traditions we are born into) but the world itself is not of our own design.  It is not easy to escape these, but it is certainly worth reflecting on how we have been shaped by the ideas about reality that we have grown up in.  Rather than let these ideas about reality be taken for granted and unexamined, the various Buddhist traditions serve as very deliberate methodologies for understanding how we exist in the world.  One of the most effective methodologies for this is Vipassana – the origin of what is now known as the Mindfulness Movement.

Imagination, Memory & Self

It is, perhaps, important for me to clarify here that I approach Buddhism as a secular practitioner and practicing psychologist.  This leads me to some cautionary notes about how Buddhism is often interpreted:  We often misinterpret the aim of meditation as a modality for freeing us from thought.  Psychologically speaking, this is both unwise and unlikely.  Thought is based on our inherent capacity for symbolic representation.  It is based on our ability to imagine.  We cannot live without imagination.  Without imagination, we have no means of conjuring up memories of the past or propelling versions of ourselves into the future.  Dementia is arguably not just a failure in memory, but underlying the loss of memory is a failure in the capacity for imagination.  Without imagination we cannot put together a version of ourselves that we present to the world as a means of getting on with the task of living.  It could be said that what we call a “self” is a felt sense of who we are, where we are and what it is that we are doing here – at any given moment in time.  It is this felt sense of self that is the needle with which we thread ourselves through time.  If the self is the needle, then our memory and imagination serve to thread this self through time.  Without these basic faculties – imagination, memory, and self – conscious experience loses coherence.  Individual moments only have meaning to us when we are able to thread them together.  However, over time the self becomes more than a feeling – it becomes an idea (or even a story) about who we are.   Our sense of self finds consistency along the patterns it weaves (habitual ways of being) as we thread our experiences into a story about our lives.  It is through this process that we start to have a sense of coherence about ourselves in relation to the world (and people) around us.  But it is also through this process that we inevitably build a fiction about this thing that we are.  We hold on to the idea of this thing that we are – an “I”, and a “me”, and all that is “mine” – as we anxiously try to preserve or defend it.  Without the faculties of imagination, memory and a feeling of self – we fear the loss of all sense of time and place.  We risk feeling fragmented. We become potentially incoherent to ourselves.

Buddhism heeds against holding on to the story we have for who we are, the “self”, too tightly.  From a Buddhist perspective, through becoming anxiously bound to the idea of who we are we become potentially ignorant to certain “truths”, chief of which being our own impermanence.

Self as Fiction

We are forever at risk of taking ourselves too seriously, of pulling the thread too tight around ideas of who we are and what we believe is really going on in our lives and, therefore, of restricting ourselves from the myriad of possibilities that life has to offer. We become entrenched in habitual emotional reactions through habitual ways of being in the world. We decide that “this is just who I am” when “who I am” is arguably a collection of patterned thoughts and behaviours that are loosely founded on an original temperament and largely shaped by the world that has been thrust upon us.

This thread (the storyline we develop in order to achieve a sense of coherence) of who we are and what we are doing here, can be easily disrupted by events in our lives, both good and bad. We could fall in love, we could lose a lover, or we could be diagnosed with cancer.  Such events can cut through this thread causing our lives to feel abruptly redefined. Covid19 has been no different to this.  For anyone paying attention, it has brought into question our environmental, social, political and economic ways of being in the world.

Buddhism teaches us that this “self”, that I achieve things with in the world, is a fiction. What I would like to emphasise is that it is somewhat of a necessary fiction. The artistry of Vipassana lies in taking this sense of self just seriously enough (through observation of it) and yet appreciating it as a fiction at the same time, through the ongoing process of “letting go”.  As Mark Epstein suggests, the problem is not that we think we are real but that we think we are “really real”.

If the self is a fiction, then what can we rely on? Buddhist practice encourages a reliance on “pregnant emptiness” of the present moment. It is here that refuge is to be found from our own inevitable neurosis. What makes it difficult for us to find refuge in the present is that our capacity for imagination means that we are forever losing ourselves to ruminations of the past or projections into the future. But I am not convinced that we are meant to do away with these faculties altogether – to give up on our imagination or to completely discard the self. To do so would mean to go deliberately mad. I believe that our task is to try and bring an ‘alertness’ to the process of how our imagination incessantly moves between past, present and future – reifying a sense of self.  Rob Nairn encourages an “impartiality” to this inevitable process as we bring awareness to it.  In this way, the practice of Vipassana helps bring us alive to the role that imagination plays in the formation of our reality. Over time, through the regular practice of Vipassana we are able to observe how thoughts and feelings shape our reality.

This is where the true therapy lies: Through ongoing practice, we come to realise just how much we are constantly rehashing the past or rehearsing the future. We seem to incessantly project a version of self into an imagined future. It is, arguably, a misinterpretation to treat these activities as a taboo or as getting it all wrong. The objective is compassionate awareness rather that critique and striving to “get better” at it. Thoughts, worries, memories, planning, rehearsing…are all tendencies essential to our cognitive functioning. It is more helpful to approach these tendencies with gentle caution rather than self-degradation:  To become an object to ourselves that we can observe with relative “equanimity” (a word Stephen Batchelor seems to prefer to Rob Nairn’s “impartiality”).

Losing ourselves to habitual thinking

This tendency, to lose ourselves in thoughts, is particularly problematic when it is the means through which we find escape from Dukkha – “the perpetual unsatisfactoriness of existence”.  When we talk about “the present moment”, we are not just talking about the sound of crickets, the wind in the trees, or the increasing ache in my back as I attempt to stay upright while meditating.  We are talking about thoughts and feelings that are presently flavouring my experience of reality.  In Buddhist psychology, thought itself is a sensory experience and it is out of our own reactions to these thoughts (grasping or aversion) that our true suffering is born.  Part of the therapeutic value of Buddhist practice lies in sifting through our own neurosis – getting a felt sense of what is “real” versus what we have “imagined” as real.  The therapeutic outcome lies in identifying how reactive and habitual thought patterns colour our reality (often in ways that perpetuate suffering).  In Buddhism, the present moment is simply the most reliable place to be.  It is where it is all really happening and, therefore, it is the place to go if we are to attempt understand anything about what it is that we are.

Thoughts can be very sticky; once they arrive, they set off habitual chains of further thoughts, feelings and behaviours.  This leads to patterns over time that form grooves in the mind.  Much like the flow of water erodes soil, these grooves are self-perpetuating.  We arrive at a place where these patterns seem to have the better of us, as if we are watching ourselves on automation.  It could be argued that habitual experiences like depression, anxiety and addiction are formed, or at the very least perpetuated, by these patterns.   For this reason, there can often be something very freeing to surrendering to the moment.  With enough practice it relinquishes us (even if momentarily) from the hold that these habitual patterns (of thought, feeling and behaviour) have on us.

The Existential Lesson of Covid19

Another way of talking about “Dukkha” is, as Mark Epstein would put it, that which is “hard to face”.  From an existential perspective, an inevitable conflict arises when we try to avoid certain “givens” to our existence.  Irvin Yalom, probably the most prolific author on Existential Therapy, summarises these “givens” as: death; freedom; isolation; and meaninglessness.  These are the anxieties that we tend to push aside in our everyday living. It is these same anxieties that Covid19 has very starkly brought into the foreground.  We are all geared, to some extent, towards ensuring our own survival.  We are inclined towards the preservation of self.  Even for those of us who are privileged enough to still be healthy, have work to keep us busy and food on our table; the idea of our own mortality lingers in the background of our everyday lives. Like the hum of the fridge in the kitchen at night – fear of our own death is there, even when we don’t pay too much attention to it. However, both Buddhism and Existentialism would argue that paying conscious attention to this anxiety opens us up to the possibility for new ways of being. It opens us up to questions like: What are the things we need to accept? What are the deeply ingrained habits we could possibly change? What does it mean to be alive in our time? What are the things that we have come to realise that we most value? What have we been taking for granted? What are the things that we are unnecessarily attached to?

The global pandemic has made degrees of isolation familiar to us all. Isolation, of any kind, serves as a confrontation with self. Buddhist practice can be described as a means of “going into oneself in order to get beyond oneself”. This is ideally what isolation facilitates. However, in a society that so highly values consumerism, we are particularly geared towards avoiding our own interiority (and the inevitable feeling of aloneness, even when we are with others); there is always something outside of ourselves that brings the hope that we will feel different or better about ourselves.   Stephen Batchelor has been exploring the existential basis of Buddhism since his earliest work, Alone with Others.  He emphasises the two basic dimensions of existence – “having” and “being”.  The central concern is that “as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial”.  We are under the illusion that the accumulation of “things”, be they objects, relationships or knowledge, can provide us lasting satisfaction at the demise of learning how to be with things as they are.

Unfortunately, isolation alone can achieve very little. If anything, it can make the fear of our own thoughts and feelings all the more daunting.  As a therapist, I have witnessed people gradually come undone during the 2020 “lockdown”.  Despite alcohol bans in South Africa, most of my clients have self-medicated on alcohol more than ever.  In his most recent work, The Art of Solitude, Batchelor draws on the work of Montaigne, a French philosopher who had no contact with Buddhism but who chose a life of relative solitude. “Retreat into yourself, but first of all make yourself ready to receive yourself there. If you do not know how to govern yourself, it would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society”.  How do we make ourselves ready to receive ourselves?

French chefs talk about “mise en place” – “everything in its place”. Before they produce a meal, they make sure that they prepare a place for everything. We need to do the same when it comes to solitude; when it comes to the act of “going into ourselves” there is a need to prepare a place for solitude. This is where the method of Vipassana (and the model it proposes for how the mind works) may be helpful. Vipassana prepares a place for us in the present moment.  Solitude, in the end, is not limited to the act of retreating into hermitage.  Even in the presence of others and especially when we truly go into ourselves, we can feel a particular isolation.  I can never truly access your experience and you can never truly access mine.  Therefore, to some extent, we are always experiencing somewhat of a solitude.  Being ready to receive ourselves requires a certain amount of courage to savour the underlying and perpetual feeling of solitude that we usually avoid through focusing on “things” outside of ourselves.  It requires a shift from a focus on “having” to an openness to “being”.

There is great value in going into isolation with a particular attitude:  Batchelor quotes Montaigne as saying “That is why it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else. We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us.  We have to isolate our own self and return it to our possession. We carry our chains with us; we are not entirely free. We keep returning our gaze to the things we have left behind; we fantasize about them constantly.”  When we isolate ourselves, we do not necessarily completely free ourselves. The opposite seems true: worlds within us; the griefs from our pasts; the longings for our future; and ways of being that have grown to size within us come to meet us.  As the poet, Don Maclennan put it in, Grieving:

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.

Don Maclennan

When we embrace solitude, we are not only confronted with the fear of loss of an outside world; we fear a loss of the worlds within us. Even when these are sometimes painful worlds – they are still familiar ones.  We hold onto their familiarity.  Albert Camus wrote that “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” But simply turning away from it is not sufficient.  We need to recognise how the world we have grown to size in has actually grown to size within us.  When we go into ourselves, we find the voices of our parents, past lovers, the media, patriarchy, capitalism and many more – some of these voices we no longer even recognise.  We risk mistaking them for our own thoughts.

This is where the practice of meditation serves a similar function to therapy.  It helps us discover answers to questions like “What are these thoughts and feelings based on?” However, in meditation, we do not attempt to answer these questions with the thinking part of our minds. We answer them by simply observing our own thoughts while holding the question in mind. While therapy might be focused on change, meditation is preferenced towards “embracing things as they are” as Batchelor would put it, and then bringing awareness to how we react to things as they are.  The practice is to have a questioning stance without ever really settling on a fixed answer.

Perhaps we could say that Covid19 has been the equivalent of Siddhartha leaving the palace:  A moment of existential anxiety when our eyes are opened to the true nature of things, particularly how our lives are connected through our shared potential suffering. There are many responses to this; one being to run back into the seclusion of our palaces (or our gated communities) and find solace in our usual pleasures; the other is to continue to venture into what it means to be alive in our times and not to turn away from the existential “givens”. The difficulty with this is that when we attend to the experience of “being in the world” it brings into sharp focus that there are somewhat incomprehensible aspects to our existence – it doesn’t ever fully make sense. Why are we here in the first place and does the universe even care?

Even if, on closer contemplation, our own existence might seem rather strange to us; it is important to carve out some sort of purpose without taking ourselves too seriously. Covid19 is a stark reminder of what David Hume wrote: “The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”  Perhaps the Covid19 crisis poses the inevitable question: Now that we realise how precarious our existence is, what do we choose to do with it?

Since birth, we are thrust into a world not of our own choosing. We need to understand our own response to this aspect of our existence and how our responses continue to shape who we are. As we struggle to let go of a world that has grown to size within us, what freedoms can we find in our reactions to the world around us? Vipassana is a method of letting go of the things that have become deeply habitual to the mind.  It is the courage to explore our existential freedom.  Existential freedom is perhaps best captured by Sartre’s proclamation that “Existence precedes essence”.  We are thrust into a world not of our own choosing; become aware of ourselves; and are compelled to make choices.  Every choice we make represents the possibilities of (wo)man – what we think a human should be.  There is no essential blueprint for who we should be.  Rather we hang on to arbitrary identities and man-made ideas. Therefore, once we let go of these stories for who and how we should be, there is some anguish to this freedom because “In fashioning myself, I fashion humanity.”

A brief note on Secular Buddhism as Psychotherapy

Although it can be therapeutic, Vipassana is not so much a therapeutic tool but a means of practicing a philosophical approach to life.  It is a means for us to practice coming to terms with how things actually are, rather than how we might fear, crave or imagine them to be.  Stephen Batchelor stresses that this is not necessarily a complacency or a resignation to how things actually are.  Once we have come to terms with what is actually going on (within us or in the world around us) we make room for new possibilities; new ways of being and thinking in the world that are less dictated by habitual reactivity –  we prepare a place for existential freedom.

Vipassana is an attempt at deepening our inherent capacity for conscious experience.  Although consciousness remains somewhat of a mystery there is perhaps nothing that mystical about it. I can recall first hearing Rob Nairn (retired professor in criminology) lecture on the topic more than 20 years ago.  He conveyed Vipassana as a succinct and pragmatic philosophy of mind.  This brief lecture served as a foundational reference point for understanding the mind and was often a means to refuting some of the theories I was exposed to while studying psychology.  Buddhist ideas were a particularly helpful vantage point in my tendency to refute diagnostic thinking:  We all suffer from the same thing, the human condition.  As Samuel Beckett claimed, “You’re on earth, there is no cure for that.”

Vipassana practice is also somewhat of a departure from western psychology in that it relies more on direct experience of the mind than theoretical ideas of mind.  Vipassana attempts to know the mind experientially rather than theoretically.  In this way it provides the foundation for any mindfulness practice – “direct experience”.  As Rob would emphasise, mindfulness is “knowing what is happening, while it is happening”.  Leaving us with a task that is alarmingly complex in a simplicity that starkly contrasts to how we go about most of our everyday lives.

“Existence is a flame which constantly melts and recasts our theories”, R.D Laing.

These ideas will be more thoroughly explored on an intensive retreat at The Buddhist Retreat Centre, Ixopo, from the 13th – 15th November with an additional exploration in Buddhist Psychotherapy from 15th – 18th November. To book, click here.

Condemned to be Free

May 12, 2020 /

I didn’t walk this morning. Sometimes it’s a freedom to go inward rather than outward. I took the time to write. To double check the date on the side of my father’s box of ashes. It’s with great irony that a laughing Buddha sits on him now. It’s a beautiful box. I never planned to keep it. Nor did I plan to put a Buddha on it. Most of life happens like this – by chance. We have less control over life than we like to believe we do. At the age of 10 I wanted to become a priest. At the age of 30, my father was sending me books on Christianity and I was sending him back articles on Narcissism. I think it is good to live life with intention but, in the end, we don’t get to actually make too many of the choices for ourselves. The choices we do make, however, are the ones that give our lives their real shape. The last choice my father made was to end his life, on this day, 9 years ago.

I am not sure when his actual moment of death came. I have spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it must have been like: how and when it actually happened. My understanding of human consciousness is that it is unlikely that we experience the moment of death. It also seems that the decision to die does not happen in a single moment. In the end he would have suffocated somewhere in the depths of the night: confused at first; maybe euphoric for a few brief moments; then he would have lost himself in a sea of unconsciousness. The anesthesia he was craving – respite from the pain of his own living. What might have come before the half-asphyxiated elation? Was there determination, perhaps fear, or was he angry? His cellphone was plugged into the car charger. A sign, perhaps, that he did not really want to die alone. It is a pretty deliberate thing to do: To cut a piece of hosepipe just long enough to reach from the exhaust to your window. I only realise now, while writing this, that hosepipes lying innocently on the grass have always had a hidden meaning for me. The first time my father tried to end his life in this way, I was my son’s age. I discovered him unconscious in his car with enough time for my mother to slap him awake again.

The thing is, you are not really choosing to end your life, you are choosing to end your pain. The fantasy of suicide visits us when we are faced with struggles we feel that we can no longer bare and yet have no solution to. It’s a bit like a mental doomsday clock: every year we set it slightly further away or slightly closer to the possibility of an inevitable end. But, the possibility is always there. “I’d rather die” is a phrase all of us might have used at least once in our lives. The reality is, despite what religions or your insurance companies might say, you are that free – to choose your own ending.

A client tells me about her daughter’s relapse. Wine coming from seemingly nowhere keeping her in a disconnected and deranged state. Many people in lockdown are struggling to be with themselves without medicine. She tells me how worried she is about her. That her daughter is talking of her own ending. I tell her that this is the place where recovery happens – the moment we decide whether to live or die. Choosing to live is choosing to finally deal with those pains. We choose endings and beginnings all day long. Suicide is simply the most obvious and final choice. In this way, life can be like a slow puncture: a gradual yet undetected suicide. To eat the extra piece of chocolate cake; to not have that mole checked out; to stay in a bad relationship; or to not resign from that job.

The reality is, we are free to do whatever we like. Such freedom is somewhat of a burden. The ownership is on us to make life what it is. This is why Sartre spoke about us being “condemned to be free”. My father tried to call me that night. I didn’t take the call. He is probably drunk, I thought to myself. I was sitting in a psychiatric hospital, listening to an inane “continued professional development” talk. His message said “Alice has left me, but I am okay.” When I called back, he didn’t answer. I knew the inevitable moment had come. His doomsday clock was finally too close to midnight.

The thing that kills us is
there’s nothing to explain
us: moral courage is
not natural, striving
to unearth it is.
We need to know
how others stare
into the eye of pain
and wade across the river
to talk to us again.
– Don Maclennan, Suicide (an extract)

My father didn’t make it across the river that night. Perhaps he could not make sense of his own pain any longer? I like to think it was a choice he made out of courage rather than confusion. I have had those nights myself, but my sons stand in my mind, on the other side of that river, and so I have managed to wade my way across it. I was no longer standing on the other side, waiting for him. I had waited too long already.

Josh just asked me “Dad, it looked like you wanted to say something”. There was something on my mind but I didn’t want to make it his problem. I replied, “Yes, but I have decided not to say it. Parents should be responsible for their children, children should not feel responsible for their parents.” He nodded.

With freedom comes the responsibility for the most difficult thing – accountability for a self carved out of the choices we make.

And so, I sit here asking myself, what are the choices I want my sons to know me by?

Still Life #9: Quiet Voices of Wisdom

April 5, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been scanning the internet for wisdom from the usual voices of reason that I value. Those usual voices are quiet. Perhaps not because they have nothing to say but because they said it all a while ago. We just weren’t listening. Perhaps now is not the time for them to reach out. Perhaps now is the time they will all be reaching in. Today there was news from Arundhati Roy. A devastating account of life in India right now. She writes about how pandemics force us to leave behind everything about the world we knew and imagine an entirely new world. She encourages us to travel light in this transition. Why would we ever want things to return to a so called “normal”?

How do we imagine a new world? I think everything we need to know has already been said. We just have to get on with it, saving as many lives as we can along the way. As Camus wrote in The Plague “But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”

So to help me find the courage to keep going, I decided to print the faces of all the voices I most value and put them on the wall above my desk. Somehow it feels slightly less forlorn, for now.

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