On "Enlightenment Therapy" in the Times.

As soon as I saw the title, Enlightenment Therapy, I knew I was going to blog about it, I just didn't realize it'd take a few days to digest, or that it would be so personal. After all, it's about the marriage of Freud and the Buddha; what integral blogger could resist?

Reading the article, though, there were a few things that hit home, and I put it down to think it over. Again, this is a fairly personal post, just a warning.

There are two main characters in the story, The zen master/ patient, and the zen student/ therapist. Their names are Lou Nordstrom and Jeffrey Rubin, respectively.

The first hint that this might be a challenging piece for me was '“The agonizing absence of internal unity made me suicidal,”' I've never been suicidal, but boy do I know some about the agonizing absence of internal unity. I always feel torn. Only rarely do I get a glimpse of something I'm finding other people take for granted. I have a sense of self, of course, of being a separate being (I am human,) but rarely do I ever know just exactly what it is I want. It turns out that Mr. Nordstrom and I share quite a few personality traits, and the further I read the more I became worried that I was falling into the same trap that Nordstrom had.

'He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity.' Unfortunately, I have not spelled out yet my working theory of mind, so bits and pieces will have to be explained as I come to them. In any case, I do the same thing. The drama in one's mind is created by oneself,* and so while I was never physically abandoned by my parents, I have always been terrified of abandonment, rejection, separation, call it what you will. The solution? Effacing myself, preemptively abandoning, rejecting, separating. Afraid that the world would reject the "real" me, I just don't speak up, giving no opportunity for what I want so badly, to be accepted, valued, heard. Again, psychological drama.

'“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me,” he told me last fall. “I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed...I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real...I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life.' Again, check, and check.

'...that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. I want to be seen for what a strange fellow I am. As a young guy I got off on the sense of being different. There was some arrogance and elitism in it. The positive spin of the surreal nature of my childhood was that there must have been some special destiny for me. To give up tenure, to become a monk, I embraced an aggrandized narrative.' While some of the words I'd use are different, the feeling, again, is the same, "embracing an aggrandized narrative." There's the desire to be noticed and accepted as being different, because special.

“Re-entry is difficult,” Nordstrom admitted. “I feel I’m going to be blindsided — that I’m being set up. The record suggests that’s what tends to happen to me.” [That is, entering life emotionally is just begging to be hurt.]

“Do you hear your language?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what tends to happen to me.”

“What do you hear — that I sound like a victim?”

“There’s no agency in there — to see that is to open to the possibility of feeling less the victim in your life.” [Perhaps why I'm overly drawn to the opposite archetype, like James Bond. The ultimate anti-victim. There's more than this though, there's also the fear of agency, the fear of my own ability to do things.]

“I know this intellectually. I’ve had this sense of being a victim, a marked man for a long time — marked for bad things and marked for great things.” [I have never felt marked for bad things, though I certainly have always felt marked for great things. Reading this, though, makes me realize that yes, actually, I have always felt fated to meet some wretched tragic end. In my fears, by bloody violent murder at the hands of a random stranger, or by plane crash, mostly. Of course, the one must have its reciprocal. Silly me not to have connected them.]

“I wonder if that isn’t a compensatory fantasy which hides a deeper pain. It’s not that ‘I was horrifically abandoned, unconscionably neglected,’ it’s ‘I have a special destiny.’ ”[This is harder for me because, again, I was never abandoned, I just feel that way. I suppose it's the same narrative, though: I have been overlooked and ignored, but everyone will see in the end how big of a mistake that was when I turn out to be the best Baseball Player / Doctor / Author / Musician / Artist / etc. etc. (fill in fantasy of the year. Some, of course, are fairly outdated.)]

“Yes,” Nordstrom said. “As a boy I consciously constructed this idea that I’m in a situation that makes no sense whatsoever. The only meaning I can glean from it is that there may be some kind of completely different life in store for me. There will be a compensation. I am owed.” [So, for this life to make sense, there has to be a surprise ending. The narrative itself assumes the legitimacy of the ego's drama. They are epiphenomenal, sides of the same coin, or cube. 'I was hurt, but if I bear this hurt, endure it, in the end I'll get my reward.' Notice the words "consciously constructed." Without the original slieght, though, the narrative makes no sense, and one's life has been wasted. The older and older one gets, the more rests on this false narrative. Quite a lot in here, one of these days I'll get that theory of the mind up.]

“What comes to mind with ‘owed’?”

“I’m entitled. That feeling got me through high school. It’s why I excelled at sports and studies.”
[Opposite for me. It's what caused me to coast through on abilities without any work, because I didn't have to. I'm me, after all, and in the end, oh you'll see.]
“It also killed you.”

The thought hung in the air.

“Why do you think I say that?” the psychoanalyst said.

“Because it’s true?”

“No, because it’s led to a passive detached relation to your own life. It’s robbed you of your human birthright. It’s like you are waiting for Godot. It keeps you in a virtual life. Do you get that? Do you feel that emotion?” [This is where the similarity really battered me. Just around the bend is the miracle that's going to change my life. It's something I'll stumble on, not work for. I've always been this way (until recently, more later.) There's always something hidden up the road, past a bend, that is, it's never something I'm concerned with at the moment, of course, that's going to super-duper change my life.]

'“I don’t know why I constantly deprive or deny myself positive experiences,” Nordstrom said after a while. “There is a perverse self-destructiveness. It’s like the theme from the movie ‘The Pawnbroker’: if my life is in good shape, then my history makes no sense. . . . When I broke my hip the first time, before I fell, I thought, Don’t move, turn on a light, then I thought, Screw it, and I fell.”' Again, the narrative (history in Nordstrom's words) has to be true, because if it's not, one's life makes no sense. If one's life is miserable, the narrative, and the ego it reinforces, makes perfect sense.

'“Stay with that ‘screw it’ voice: are you saying nothing that happens to you that’s good is going to make a difference?”

“There is something I know that I really want that I’m never really going to get. It may be mother. It may be mother.”

“Maybe your pessimistic stance is a defense against that shattering realization. Maybe you see your life as a Faustian bargain: I will not have hope demolish the hope that one day what I want will come.”

“My least favorite word in the English language is ‘hope.’ ”

“And in the meantime you’re knee-deep in it!”'

The ego is a mesh of paradox, that's why it survives so well. Tackle it one way, well, it wasn't ever like that anyway. Nordstrom rejects hope of ever getting what he really wants, because to get it would negate the hope that is that final reward. Hating hope is the surest sign of how dependant you are on it.

Reading this article threw me out of whack, to say the least. Was I fooling myself? Was I only trying to do in a more aggressive and radical way exactly what I was trying to cure myself of? Sitting on this a few days, I've reaffirmed what I've been doing, though this article was certainly a wakeup call. Perhaps because I was born later, perhaps because my childhood was not traumatic, but I'm not running away from life into meditation. Far from it. The further I've gotten along in my self-directed course of growth, the richer and fuller my life has become, the more I've taken responsibility for my life and its direction, the more active I've been able to be to pursue and complete real, practical goals, and the happier and more emotionally engaged I've been. I have not been doing what Nordstrom did, quite the non-opposite. Rather than throw myself into meditation as a solution, or rely only on analytical accounts of the mind, I've been practicing meditation to give me more energy and insight into the ego so that as I heal it I can return more mindfully to meditation, and so on and so forth.

Of course, the basic structure of my ego remains, and I haven't fully reconciled its contradictions in health. I'm thankful that this article revealed this to me, and I'm thankful to you as well, whoever is reading. Even if nobody, getting all of this onto (electronic) paper is extremely helpful. It's real.

'Rubin was convinced that “the marriage of Buddha and Freud” would benefit both disciplines. “When you combine the best of Buddhism and psychoanalysis,” he told me one day last winter, “you get a full-spectrum view of human nature focused on both health and spiritual potential as well as on the psychological forces we struggle with and the obstacles we unconsciously put in our way.”'

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*That is, while you can always draw external correlations to prove your fears, a different person would draw different correlations from the same external conditions. Beaten by a mother, one child develops to fear abandonment, another to fear loss of control, and both point back to the same event.

A way of thinking about Dennett's theory of consciousness: a vote, and decision making.

I was just thinking about an article I wrote about here when I thought of a much better (and topical) metaphor for the way consciousness works in the human brain according to Daniel Dennett.

For the non-clickers:

(From Dennett:)

'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'

(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."

It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.

What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.

In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."

There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.

In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.

Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:

In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)

Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.

This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.

This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.

Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.

Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.

The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.

There's a variety pack for you to chew on.