Highlights from chapter 7 of Thoughts Without a Thinker. This chapter really resonated with me as someone who has studied dissociation a lot over the last 5+ years. The perspectives of self changed me entirely in a way that western views of the self could not reach alone. The way the two schools of thought can compliment each other to help bring about healing and transformation has been really significant for me.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy tends to lead to experiences that reenact earlier and more formative emotional relationships so that the person’s history can be, in effect, reconstructed. Buddhist meditation tends to intensify certain ego functions so that the sense of self is at once magnified and deconstructed. Psychotherapy often involves the creation of a narrative to explain a person’s history, while meditation is a process of questioning the most basic metaphors that we use to understand ourselves.
The most moving emotional experiences in therapy are those of the transference, in which it is revealed how earlier relationships are still shaping and defining present-day interactions, as demonstrated in the actual relationship with the therapist. The most moving experiences in meditation are those that enable the meditator to come face-to-face with various cherished images of self, only to reveal how ultimately lacking such images are.
One is challenged to experience terror without fear and delight without attachment. The work of meditation, in one sense, is the work of developing an ego that is flexible, clear, and balanced enough to enable one to have such experiences.
The process of repeatedly applying bare attention strengthens the observing ego to a point where free association is really possible.
From the Buddhist perspectives, this longing is important because of how identified the meditator can be with this state. “Who is the self that longs?”
Many [early meditators] become enamored of the observing self that beginning meditation empowers and use that capacity for self-observation as a way to avoid personal responsibility. They observe their own pain, but not their contribution to its making.
We all tend to think about the self as Freud did, in spatial terms: as an entity with boundaries, layers, and a core, much like an onion or a building or an archaeological dig. [example] “The mind is a place where things happen,” says the psychoanalyst Stephen A. Mitchell of this view. “The self is something in this place, which is composed of constituent parts or structures.” One of the consequences of this mode of experiencing is that it feeds the tendency to search for a “core” or a true self at the “center” of our being. Another consequence can be seen in the longing for “wholeness”..
The ego is “split,” with the observing self practicing awareness of “objects” of mind and body. The mind is often experienced as a vast space within which flourish the various parts of the self, as a cave that must be penetrated, or as a plant that must be traced back to its roots. Beginning meditators often confront a feeling of hollowness or emptiness, coupled with a longing for completion or wholeness. This is usually a sign, in psychodynamic terms, of some estranged or disclaimed aspect of themselves that must be integrated through therapeutic endeavors.
Staying with those feelings, instead of trying to shut them down, he found that this central hole would expand and contract, eventually opening into a vast space of clear light that became a metaphor for an identity not limited by shame and insecurity.
From the point of view of Buddhist practice, the reason for developing concentration is to quiet the mind sufficiently to allow inquiry into the nature of self. The self-states that are discovered along the way provide opportunities to examine the hold that such idealized experiences can have over us.
Like bare attention, mindfulness means being aware of exactly what is happening in the mind and body as it is occurring: what it reveals is how much of a flux we are in at all times.
With the mindfulness practices comes a shift from a spatially based experience of self to a temporal one. Having accomplished a certain amount of inner stability through concentration, the meditator is now able to look more closely at the moment-to-moment nature of mind and self. Mindfulness involves awareness of how constantly thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations shift in the mind and body. Rather than promoting a view of self as an entity or as a place with boundaries, the mindfulness practices tend to reveal another dimension of the self-experience, one that has to do with how patterns come together in a temporary and ever-evolving organization.
Once mindfulness has been developed, the self can never be thought of in the same spatially based manner again. Mindfulness is seen as the pivotal ingredient, the catalyst for a profound change in the way self is experienced.
As the shift from a spatially based sense of self to a temporally based one occurs, it becomes impossible to ignore just how removed we all are from what Mitchell has called the “rushing fluidity” of our everyday experience. In the premindfulness state, our minds are most often operating independently of our bodies, on a different level, as it were, from the actions that our bodies are performing.
When we think of our bodies as “things” that are separate from us and our minds as “places” where we think, we foster our own sense of alienation or remove. Mindfulness practice begins, for this reason, with awareness of the breath and the body: the appreciation of the temporally based dimension of self stems from the ability to pay attention to bodily based experiences as they occur. It is quite literally a coming to one’s senses.
The self structured by an awareness of breathing can take its time going from moment to moment, just as breathing usually does. It does not run after or get ahead of time but, instead, seems simply to move with it.
After quieting the mind, developing the observing ego, and approaching some sense of wholeness or open space, the emphasis shifts to an appreciation of just how difficult, and yet possible, it is to surrender to the flow of experience. Gradually expanding the foundations of mindfulness to include feelings, thoughts, emotions, and mind, the successful practitioner keeps coming up against her own desires to somehow halt the flow, to convert the breath–based experience of fluidity and change to an appetite–based one of gratification or satisfaction.
..it is impossible to turn the river around. Once mindfulness is developed, there is no avoiding the relentless and teeming rush that underlies our experience. There comes a point in the intensive cultivation of mindfulness when it proceeds effortlessly and unencumbered, when experience unfolds continuously with awareness, but without self–consciousness.
There is a relaxation of the tensed self that evolved to manage parental intrusiveness or neglect and an emergence of a simpler, breath–based self that is capable of surrender to the moment.
..shift from an appetite–based, spatially conceived self preoccupied with a sense of what is lacking to a breath–based, temporally conceived self capable of spontaneity and aliveness..
Attachment is continuously surrendered as the meditator opens more and more to direct experience. This is a particularly powerful time in meditation, for there is in most of us a profound longing for just this kind of giving up of the constraints of our personalities. In mindfulness practice, this yielding of false self is a continual possibility.
..the meditator practicing mindfulness must surrender her psyche to the winds that carry her, relinquishing the identifications that are based on idealization and objectification, the false self of narcissism that has led her to feel hollow or empty.
The higher experiences of meditation are all basically ways of tricking the self into revealing more and more basic identifications, of evoking more and more delectable states that urge the feeling of “Ahhh, this is the real me!” out of us. In states of developed concentration the body disappears, even an emotion so coarse and disruptive as joy can disappear..
In mindfulness practice, self is experienced as a flow, a process, a rushing and teeming patterning that changes over time.
Defined explicitly by the types of questions—such as Who am I? What is the true nature of self? What was your face before you were born?—[insight meditation] requires the preliminary cultivation of both concentration and mindfulness as the foundation or structure that permits successful self-inquiry.
..the belief in a unique personal individuality, endemic among psychotherapists and their patients, is “the very mother of illusions.
Having seen ourselves in the mirror, we think that is who we have to be.
When the powers of concentration and mindfulness are directed onto the actual experience of “I,” a peculiar thing starts to happen: what had once seemed very stable suddenly becomes very unstable. The most basic self-feelings become the primary focus at this stage of practice, and the closer one looks at them, the more absurd they start to seem. These self-feelings are suddenly revealed to be nothing but images: the reflection that had assumed an independent existence in the psyche is seen for what it always was—a metaphor or mirage.
In stripping away people’s cravings to have to be something, the insight practices actually allow meditators to function in the everyday world unencumbered by the need to protect the false sense of “I.” When the privacy of the self is fully explored, using the tools of concentration, mindfulness, and insight, neither annihilation (nothingness) nor a permanent isolate can be found.
The mindfulness practices cultivate the ability to surrender into the moment, and they elasticize the sense of self by emphasizing its inherent fluidity. The insight practices explode the last illusions of self-sufficiency by zeroing in on a self that breaks up under objective scrutiny.
Self, it turns out, is a metaphor for a process that we do not understand, a metaphor for that which knows. The insight practices reveal that such a metaphor is unnecessary, even disruptive. It is enough, these practices reveal, to open to the ongoing process of knowing without imputing someone behind it all.
