Epilogue: Your Ordinary Mind Is the Way

One thing we did not foresee when Jeremy Safran’s book first came out was the explosive growth of the mindfulness movement. The unfolding dialogue between Buddhism and psychotherapy increasingly has become narrowed down to a mutual admiration fest between those touting the benefits of meditation, often armed with the latest scans brought back from the frontiers of neuroscience, and therapists almost all of a cognitive behavioral stripe, well versed in an “evidence-based” approach to short term psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis’ role in this dialogue has been increasingly diminished, if not marginalized. If for nothing else, the establishment of an Institute for the integration of Buddhism and Self Psychology comes as much needed counterbalance to this trend. Not so many years ago, I was invited to be part of another panel on Buddhism and psychotherapy, that was attended by over 500 participants. To my surprise, I discovered that for 95% or more of those in attendance, it was taken for granted that Buddhism was synonymous with mindfulness and therapy meant cognitive behavioral therapy or one of its offshoots. Other panelists cited study after study that trumpeted the benefits of meditation for a host of psychological and medical difficulties. It was taken for granted that meditation was done in order to reap these benefits. In my talk I ventured to say, to the contrary, meditation – at least as practiced in my Zen tradition – was useless. In fact, the very essence of meditation as a religious practice was that it opened up a space outside of our usual means-to-an-end thinking, and that the reduction of the cultural and ethical complexity of Buddhism to an instrumentalized mindfulness was something of a travesty, on par with listening to Bach to lower your blood pressure. There is something particularly Western and particularly misguided about turning meditation into one long self improvement project. This critique eventually culminated in a book I (2016) edited with fellow Zen teacher and psychologist Robert Rosenbaum, called “What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (and what Isn’t)” that outlined all the ways in which Buddhism had become deracinated, secularized and instrumentalized in its Western reincarnation so as to become what has been ironically labeled McMindfulness (Purser, 2019).

I want to take this opportunity to briefly outline my own understanding of Zen practice and how it differs both from Kulka’s metaphysical vision and from the instrumentalization of meditation represented by mindfulness. These differences demonstrate that Buddhism, just as much as psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, is far from having universally agreed upon unified set of theories and practices, and the relative harmony or disharmony of our dialogue may well be a function of which school of Buddhism is attempting to engage with which flavor of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.

For me, both Zen and psychoanalysis are ritualized disciplines of attention to our moment to moment experience. In psychoanalysis, the therapeutic relationship serves both as the container and the field of observation. In Zen meditation, which may appear to an outsider to be a solitary, inner directed activity, the actual practice involves immersion in an ongoing performative group activity, in which, as the great Zen master Dogen (1200–1253) taught, we collectively enact enlightenment through our zazen. The identity of practice and realization, according to Dogen, is the ultimate alternative to means-to-an-end thinking. In practice this means that one does not become enlightened as a result of having purified the mind of defiling thoughts or feelings or once one has cultivated extraordinary states of oneness or compassion, but that one sits with the paradox that our “ordinary mind is the Way.”

Psychoanalysis and Zen, then in the most radical sense, allow us leave everything just as we find it. Thus, the Zen adage, “Don’t remove delusion, don’t even seek the truth.” The patient or student who arrives in a constant state of judging, fixing, expelling, improving, denying etc. etc. needs to learn to literally sit still. Whether we attribute this initial state of unrest to mechanisms like repression, dissociation or projection, we find that we all engage in a process of expelling from ourselves, in one way or another, some aspects of our mind, thoughts or feelings that bring with them seemingly unbearable conflict, guilt or shame. But we expel not only painful aspects, but powerful idealized states as well. Growing up in a state of dependency, of reliance on parental figures for our most basic developmental needs, we inevitably organize our emergent sense of self around and through these idealized figures. Our various psychoanalytical theories offer different accounts of the role these idealizations play our in our lives, in ways both defensive and enlivening. But one way or another, something in us will remain stunted if everything we idealize remains externalized, whether in a relational configuration or abstracted into metaphysical, transcendental or divine form. That is why in Zen, it was said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” As long as you imagine the Buddha to be someone other than yourself, as something separate from yourself, you are perpetuating a delusion. That idealization must be “killed” in order to bring back inside, what you have been unable to imagine has been yours all along.

The paradox of both practices is that they provide a container to leave everything alone, something we all can barely bear to do, if at all, an activity that goes against the grain of everything that brought the person to one or the other practice in the first place, in the hope of the relief of suffering. Yet our ongoing suffering, we discover, is a byproduct of the very forces we have set in motion in an attempt to deal with our early traumas or deprivations. Staying with, in the form of understanding, empathy and recognition, allow us to interrupt the avoidant, dissociative, projective cycles in which we have become trapped.

In Zen, the vehicle of this process is literally sitting still. In the face of restlessness, emotional turmoil or physical pain, we remain sitting still. Ideally, the capacity to stay with physical pain would generalize to the capacity to stay with emotional conflict. Unfortunately, as Grace Schireson points out, all too often, this staying still with what is, has colluded with authoritarian, patriarchal and hyper-masculine models of endurance, which in turn have led to the splitting off of dependent and sexual needs that in turn have erupted in the scandals that have roiled Western Buddhism. Buddhism has been needed Western psychology to bring awareness to these unconscious dimensions of meditation experience. It has not all been a one-directional process of Westerners learning at the feet of enlightened Asian masters.

From my personal experience, I would say that the analyst meditator develops just this capacity to be still, to be a relatively non-reactive container in the face of the patient’s reactivity and while being reliably responsive to transference needs. In non-reactivity, empathy does indeed grow, but does not, in my experience or the experience of the Zen teachers I know, expand infinitely, nor does it put one in tune with a hidden dimension of transpersonal experience.

Kohut (1981), in his final paper, “On Empathy,” lamented the “misalliance” of biology and psychology that led to drive theory. Introspection and empathy, he said, defined “our field as the inner life of man and therefore we are psychologists.” Perhaps he would be open to the idea of meditation as a highly refined technique of introspection, but I doubt that he would be sympathetic to the sort of alliance with either Buddhism or quantum physics that gives rise to transcendental or metaphysical theories like “interspace” or “interbeing.” Caught between the Scylla of Raanan Kulka’s “ethical psychoanalysis” and the Charybdis of Mindfulness, I feel myself trying to steer clear of both the transcendent and metaphysical on the one hand and the instrumental on the other. As more and more psychologists and psychoanalysts not only practice meditation, but become part of the next generation of meditation teachers, both disciplines will be transformed in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. Analysts will be changed by their meditation practices, to be sure, but those practices themselves are in the process of being changed as we increasingly recognize the psychological blindspots built into many meditation traditions. Progress will be made if and when we recognize both traditions hold within them complexities and contradictions that require correctives from the other.

Barry Magid, M.D.

Issue Editor