What Buddha Understood But Freud Didn't

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

-Albert Einstein

Wise people across all cultures and from time immemorial have essentially been repeating the same maxim: “Know thyself.” In spite of all the things we do to know ourselves, we remain a mystery to ourselves throughout our lives. We all have multiple natures. If told a secret, one part of us wants to honor the vow by not telling the secret; however, we also experience a little relief by telling someone about the secret we’ve been asked to keep in confidence. We are truly divided: we simultaneously want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own resentments but are unwilling or somehow unable to forgive. It is as if we are not one monolithic identity or self but, rather, a myriad of selves with various and opposing drives.

The notion of the unconscious is a term Sigmund Freud used to connote all of the irrational forces that drag us hither and thither, that cause us to act and react in ways that we cannot and do not totally understand, nor can we consciously identify with. The goal of psychotherapy, according to Freud, was to come to an understanding of these subsurface urges through psychoanalysis, which consisted of dream interpretation and talk therapy.

Ultimately, at best, the psychotherapeutic patient, according to Freud, could not be cured of his or her divided self, but, instead, could become reconciled to the fact that he or she was made up of complex and multifarious drives. This simple knowledge would allow the individual to, once again, function as a contributing member of society.

Freud initiated the West’s fascination with the unconscious, but individuals in the Indian subcontinent had been exploring the divided self for thousands of years prior to Freud. People like Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, had been experimenting on themselves as far back as the sixth century, B.C.E. in order to overcome life’s uneasy and sometimes even distressing qualities.

Like Freud, these “self-scientists” saw the suffering that resulted from their divided urges, but the goal was different; in fact, it was more thorough. They weren’t trying to fit into society again. Instead, they sought total freedom; not freedom from society per se, but freedom from the divided self. They sought access to resolving this divide. They sought a kind of wholeness. And their approach was quite different.

Je Pense, Donc Je Suis

In 1637, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes turned the West’s model of reality inside out when he stated: “Je pense, donc je suis,” or “I think, therefore I am.” What he implied in this statement was that being is conditional upon thinking. This notion that the human was first and foremost a thinking entity set a course for philosophical development in which the mind and body were separated, that the body was of a lower nature because, unlike the mind, it was not rational.

Descartes believed that minds and bodies were distinct kinds of substance. Bodies, he held, were spatially extended substances, incapable of feeling or thought; minds, in contrast, were thinking, feeling substances. Freud’s methodology is a byproduct of this paradigm; only through the use of the rational, logical mind can we come to terms with our divided self.

However, the more complex the thought patterns, the more we become separated from the fundamental problems and conflicts we experience. Thinking, while useful in solving some problems, often begets more problems, more fragmentation, and more complexity.

This is the fundamental difference between Freud and the Buddha: Freud sought to make rational sense of the divided self. The Buddha agreed that the self was divided, fragmented, and, ultimately, a great mystery, but he recognized that the thinking mind could not resolve the mystery. In other words, he couldn’t think his way out of the problem of fragmentation. He needed another methodology, another approach.

At first, the Buddha’s path was pretty extreme. He spent six years attempting to conquer the parts of himself that he didn’t like by trying to overcome the appetite for food, sex, and even comfort. He fasted. He took vows of celibacy. He slept in brambles and exposed himself to extreme heat and cold. In fact, his efforts in self-abnegation through fasting were so fierce that when he found himself near-to-death, he accepted a bowl of rice from a young girl.

Once he had eaten, he had a realization that physical austerities were not the means to overcoming the divided self. Starvation didn’t help. It only reinforced the divide by killing off the physical body. And so, instead of negating the various urges, trying to get away from them, he developed his own methodology of facing them. What he discovered was that when he could observe his body’s frustrations, anxieties, hurts, and longings in a non-reactive way, they lost their hold on him.

The Nervous System

Like Freud, he discovered two minds occurring simultaneously: the conscious mind (the mind of apparent reality) and the unconscious mind (the mind below the surface). While Freud used dream analysis to understand the hidden meaning of one’s unconscious thoughts, drives, and desires, the Buddha made use of an even simpler and more direct tool for making sense and working with the unconscious drive. What he observed was that when he lost contact with a presence of mind, he almost always left his body. If the thoughts were anxious, angry, or stimulating, and he brought his attention into the body, he would also notice his heart racing along with jittery feelings that made it difficult to sit still. If, on the other hand, he touched hopeless/helpless thoughts, thought forms associated with shame or overwhelm, he noticed his heart and breath rates would slow down, that he would feel drowsy, shut down, empty, and cold. He also noticed that whenever these feelings came on, a reflexive patterning of behaviors would ensue, behaviors that would prolong his loss of contact from presence.

Upon discovering this pattern, he devised a path out, a path he called mindfulness. Simply by observing, by staying present, non-reactive and gentle with himself when he fell into various qualities of fight, flight or freeze responses, he could settle his nervous system enough. By doing so, he developed a capacity to settle his nervous system’s reactivity.

Essentially, what the Buddha recognized was that this awareness, this means of knowing that what rests below the surface-the network of nerve cells and fibers that transmit nerve impulses between parts of the body and the brain-always remains inaccessible to us until we slow down and feel. While we have a great deal of training in thinking about the circumstances we find ourselves in thanks to Descartes, Freud, and pop-psychology, we have little to no training in working directly with our nervous systems. When we develop greater awareness and skillfulness when we lose the balance of our minds, we also gain a greater capacity to heal.  

Staying Open

My aunt Jeannde came to my yoga classes at 87. She bent and twisted and breathed next to the twenty-somethings in the room. When I told her a few of my students found her inspiring, she couldn't understand why. Age meant nothing to her, except that her body answered less easily than it had in her years as a dancer.

There's a photo of her with whipped cream smeared across her face. She was playful right to the end.

Melissa and I said goodbye a few days before she died. She was somewhere between this life and the next, in a lot of physical pain, and not scared. We managed a few words. We told each other what we had meant to each other. We said I love you. Then we said goodbye.

I've thought about that room a lot since. Not because she made dying look peaceful. Because she stayed with what was happening, including the parts that hurt.

Most of the people I work with have learned the opposite move. When something hurts, or turns uncertain, or doesn't fit the calendar, they close around it and keep going. You override the part of you that is tired or afraid, and you perform through it. It works for a long time. That is the problem with it.

Jeannde didn't perform anything. She was in pain, and she said I love you in the same breath. She didn't leave herself to get through the moment.

At each threshold, there's the same choice: to stay or to close around it and go. She was in a lot of pain, and she stayed.

Spirituality That Includes Darkness

Life is a mystery, and most of the systems that claim to explain it are covering it over. If you're honest, you don't know why any of this is happening. Some of it is wonder. A lot of it looks like a random run of luck, and some of it looks flatly cruel. Anyone who lives long enough sees that.

There are two easy ways out, and both are a kind of denial. One is to drown in the darkness until you want to give up. The other is to deny it's there. The second one dresses up as spirituality more often than the first.

The law of attraction is the clean example. The pitch is that you can think your way to whatever you want. Stay positive, hold the image, and it comes. Which means when the unwanted thing arrives, the illness, the loss, it must have been something in you that drew it. You weren't positive enough. Your own thoughts betrayed you. I've watched people do real damage to themselves with that idea. It's the same trade the performance runs: worth and safety made contingent on getting it right, and the ache turned into your own failure.

I don't think your disgust and your grief are flaws to rise above. They're part of how you tell true from false. A spirituality that asks you to feel only the bright things isn't open. It's guarding, with better vocabulary.

There's a knowing that doesn't come through the intellect. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ran on it, because their lives depended on sensing what was around them. We traded most of it in for planning, tracking, and controlling, and we got good at that, and we came to trust nothing we couldn't verify. So now we feel the truth of something in the body and wave it off unless the science backs it up.

An honest spirituality leaves nothing out. Not the darkness in the world, not the darkness in you, not the thing you sense and can't prove. It doesn't reduce to four tidy truths or ten clean rules. It stays at the razor's edge of what you know, where what you were sure of yesterday might not hold today.

Paradox: Discipline v. Freedom

Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century Indian mystic, taught with a picture I think about often. When you plant a sapling, you put a fence around it so the cattle don't eat it and nobody tramples it. When the sapling has grown into a tree, the fence has to come off. Leave it up and the fence starts doing the opposite of its job: the trunk grows into it and gets trapped. The grown tree doesn't need protecting anyway. It drops fruit, even for the cattle that once threatened it.

When I first built a daily meditation practice, I needed the fence. It took me a few years to learn the discipline: early to bed, early up, eating properly, enough rest. I needed all of it in order to grow, and I loved it. It fed me deeply.

After a while, though, the fences produced rigidity instead of growth. I caught myself judging people who didn't practice as "unconscious." The fragility I'd once protected had given way to a kind of spiritual arrogance. When curiosity goes, that's the sign: either the structure needs to change or I need a new way into it.

Taking the fence down is the hard part, and the reason isn't mysterious. Our identities get wrapped up in the structure and the recognition it brings. When a community considers you advanced, and you're identified with that role, letting go can feel like a kind of identity suicide. We need recognition; humans do. But most of us are starved enough for it that we trade our own experience away to stay loved, admired, wanted, needed. And then we miss the life that was supposed to be the point.

One tell is the word should. When I hear myself saying I do the practice because I should, my heart has already left it.

The point of practice was never to end up more disciplined. It was to put us in contact with our own wisdom, and, past that, to give what we find. That's the end of Ramakrishna's picture: the fruit falls to everyone, even the cattle. But none of that happens while the fence is still up. The trunk just keeps growing into the wire.

The True Meaning of Faith

Years ago I came across a talk by Karen Armstrong on the Golden Rule. What stayed with me was a side point about the word belief.

In its older sense, belief did not mean agreeing to a set of propositions. It meant something closer to commitment: I engage myself. Trust in God was not something you decided. It formed through practice, day in and day out, and the doctrine only made sense once you were living it. Armstrong's point was that religious teachings are a summons to action, and you understand them only when you act on them.

The Yoga Sutras work the same way. There is a worldview under the text, but it is barely described, and it does not much matter whether the yogi believes in it. The text is organized around practice, the doing. What comes out of the practice is a kind of insight you can trust. That is belief in the old sense. You did not take it on. You arrived at it.

Once, I tried to open a debate with an orthodox Jewish friend about his interpretation of the Torah. He told me we couldn't have the discussion because he understood the Torah to be written by God, and I understood it to be written by men. To talk with him, I would have had to disbelieve what I knew. That is the modern arrangement: a comprehensive account of the world that asks you to override your own sense of things. Blind faith is claiming to know a subject you never studied.

Practice can turn into the same trap. I've seen yoga and meditation teachers whose whole lives are dedicated to a severe version of a tradition, even when it injures them and the people they teach. They can contort their bodies. They stopped growing a long time ago. The adherence became the point.

Whatever discipline you keep, its job is to put you in contact with something you could not have seen otherwise. Stay with it long enough, and what forms is different from blind faith. It is the kind of trust you know in your bones, even in the moments you've lost your way.