I think – I don’t exist?
I think – I don't exist?
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I think – I don't exist?
The article describes the dissonance that a Buddhist meditation practitioner may feel within himself between the Buddha’s truth about the absence of self, and his personal experience of having a self or self of his own that distinguishes him from others. The article argues that when there is no explicit discussion of the conflict between the two cognitions, the practitioner experiencing such a conflict can resolve it through various spiritual detours – such as denying the self, compartmentalizing conflicting truths, renouncing his desires, or identifying with an ideal spiritual self of Buddhism. The conclusions from this analysis are (a) the conflict can be resolved by consciously accepting the experience of the self and understanding that the self is in a constant process of becoming and transformation; and (b) the truth of the absence of self has the function of an ethical and educational message designed to prevent believers from clinging to and glorifying the self – the main source of human suffering, conflict, and war in the world – and thus opening up with compassion to the existence of the other. The article was written based on the author’s personal experience practicing Buddhist meditation.
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The idea of the absence of self according to Buddhism and its meaning for man in Western culture
By Menashe Cohen
A – Introductory Notes
For the past five years, I have participated in a Buddhist meditation practice, known as mindfulness, in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and spiritual teacher, writer, and poet who has lived and worked in France for many years. The practice is supposed to help participants develop awareness and attention to everything – sitting, speaking, eating, walking, life in general. The basic practice is listening to the breath, instead of thoughts (Cohen, 2007). The goal of the practice is to free ourselves from the automatic behavior that comes from the habits and patterns we all have, and thus open up to a broader consciousness, beyond the habits and defenses of the empirical self. In other words, the goal is to learn to listen and observe, to let the turbulent mind quiet down and fade into the shadows, and thus live mindfully and be present here and now.
In this article, I will describe my experience and observation of the psychological obstacles that arise during the practice of Buddhist meditation. I will focus on the contradiction that a person practicing the Buddhist path may feel – a contradiction between the noble Buddhist truth of “no self” and the personal experience that such an “I” or “self” is real. My descriptions of the psychological difficulties of the “practitioner” are difficulties that I have experienced myself at various times, or that I have witnessed in others in the practice groups in which I participated.
From the practice, I have derived the ability to be present on a continuous basis in daily life, and the relative liberation from over-identification and the need to cling to desires and habits. The clarity of thought and the expansion of consciousness following the practice have a positive effect on all areas of my life, and in particular on my professional work. The practice has contributed greatly to the development of ways to create calm and relaxation in situations of mental stress (Cohen, 2007). At the same time, my professional training and experience as a therapist have greatly helped me to observe processes within myself and in a group, to distinguish between the essential and the trivial, and to follow the internal dialogues and conflicts that arose in me and others through practice. What may sound like a criticism of Buddhism stems from my desire for understanding and clarity, and not from a fundamental reservation about Buddhism as a way of developing consciousness, or about the people with whom I have spent many hours of meditation and mindfulness.
B – The idea of anatta (no self) versus the concept of self in the West
Buddhism has long been recognized in Western culture as a gateway to the development of the human being from a separate, self-centered individual being to a person with an awakened universal consciousness who is capable of experiencing peace and feeling compassion for the suffering of others. The transformation that Buddhism strives for is achieved through a continuous process of practice, and suffering ends when a person deals with the five roots of the “poisons” (kleshas) that feed suffering – attachment, aggression, ignorance, jealousy and arrogance – and reaches enlightenment. This transformation occurs, according to Buddhism, when a person is freed from the control of the world of phenomena, from craving and attachment to things, and from a mistaken and misleading belief in the conceptual solidity of reality and the idea of self; someone who “awakens” recognizes the interdependence of all things in existence, and is freed from suffering that originates in the illusion of a separate “I” with objective reality and validity. In Buddhism, the belief that such an “I” exists is the mother of all sins, since this belief entails an investment in the cultivation and protection of a separate ego, a condition that provokes and feeds war and violence between people.
In contrast to this perception, a person in Western culture will usually feel that he is in charge of his own life, and will experience himself as a being with an identity, as a person who makes decisions, chooses his path, is responsible for his actions, and as a subject who feels and is aware of his choices and the existential necessity to choose. For the practitioner of the path of Buddhism living in Western culture, a cognitive dissonance is therefore created between two contradictory cognitions: between anatta, the universal and abstract truth of Buddhism regarding the absence of self, and the personal experience of identity and selfhood that distinguishes us from others. The claim about the absence of an individual self can arouse pain and anxiety in someone who grew up and was educated in Western culture, and can raise the question within him of what can replace the experience of self other than emptiness, or is it not scary at all. The Buddhist idea of emptiness is too abstract, like the idea of the absence of self, and only at an advanced stage in practice can one begin to feel that it is understandable and meaningful; It is not tangible enough, just as the knowledge that the Earth is round is not tangible because we feel it as flat. In this context, it is said that “Bahikayu once asked the Buddha: ‘Lord, is it possible for a person to suffer when he does not find something permanent within himself?’ Being aware of this fear, the Buddha replies: ‘Yes, Bahikayu… The thought that I may not be, that I may not have, does arouse anxiety in one who lives in the world without guidance.'” (in Abe, 1998: 184)
The fear of nothingness is also discussed in existential thought in the West. According to Heidegger, death is the clearest expression of nothingness, and the fear of it may arouse awareness of existence and the need to cling to and stabilize one’s self-identity, even if it is a fiction. According to Sartre, “Human existence is nothingness, […] nothingness that fills itself with conscious content” (in Luria, 2002, p. 210). Luria wrote:
We need self-identity in order to attribute meaning to our lives and what happens in them, but we have nothing to cling to in order to do so, but can only invent it on the basis of what our culture offers us or on the basis of our power of invention. Either way, it is a false self-identity, whose meaning for us is contingent only on us. Hence, the meaning we attribute to our lives is nothing but a fiction. And indeed, according to Sartre, we live in constant fear that what is meaningful in our lives will cease to be meaningful. We would like a meaning that rests on a different foundation. We would like a meaning that is, indeed, inherent in us, but is also as solid as a rock that rises above the waves, and which does not require us to worry about it all the time. (ibid., p. 215)
For Buddhism, the solidity of that rock is an illusion from which we must awaken. On the issue of the reality of the self, then, there is a surprising similarity between East and West.
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C - The danger of over-identification and spiritual detours
The concept of self in Western culture, compared to the Buddhist understanding of the absence of self, has been widely discussed on various occasions (Suzuki, Fromm, and De Martino, 1975; Revel and Ricard, 1998; Biderman, 2003; Peled, 2005; Epstein, 2007; Molino, 1998; Watson, 2008; Welwood, 2000). However, to the best of my understanding and experience, the issue does not reach awareness and explicit discussion among participants in mindfulness and meditation practices in the spirit of Buddhism. Without such discussion, the conceptual ambiguity produces emotional confusion that is not addressed and does not receive the appropriate place in personal and group discourse. Instead, the conflicts are handled through various psychological defenses. Here are some examples:
Self-denial: The participant holds the belief that there is no self and declares it from time to time – and at the same time feels anger that is directed at his environment that, in his opinion, does not treat him correctly, or does not act according to the rules. The anger is directed at the people in the group and has no ownership or responsibility for it, and it is perceived as “justified” and explained by the necessity that the others will behave differently and according to the rules of the practice, as they say. However, if there is no self – who is angry? And who is it that declares “there is no self”?
Self-renunciation: The participant is tormented by feelings of guilt for not fulfilling himself in his occupation and life, that is, for not coping or not being assertive enough to maintain his position at work – and at the same time feels guilty in light of the insights of the practice about these feelings of guilt. He therefore gives up a part of himself that he would like to realize, saying that he can find peace by giving up. However, if there is no self – who is tormented and who is giving up?
Dispelling conflicting beliefs: The participant can live and practice the Buddhist messages about the suffering that stems from craving and clinging – and at the same time listen to desires (passions) that come from his authentic interiority; but he does not notice that craving and clinging to its objects create suffering that he wants to eliminate. So, who is it that craves? And who is it that wants to stop craving?
Accepting the verdict: The participant can be familiar with the basics of Buddhism and its basic messages about the absence of self, but experience an internal conflict when he is aware of the experience of the self that lives and acts within him. With no other solution, he chooses to justify the contradiction by saying that “there is nothing to do. There is an ego. We are born with it.” Who is it that practices Buddhism, and who is it that says and lives the statement that “there is nothing to do”?
Over-identification: The participant adopts what he probably perceives as an ideal spiritual self of Buddhism, and acts in society with boundless dedication and compassion; inevitably he is hurt when he becomes misunderstood in the environment in which he operates, since the rules of the game in society are different. It is worth noting that over-identification according to Buddhism is something that the practitioner must work on in order to be free from, and therefore, unwittingly, the practitioner who adopts such an identification sins against himself and the spirit of Buddhism. Who is it that learns not to identify in order to be free from attachments and suffering? And who is it that behaves out of over-identification and in a way that is not appropriate to the context in which he operates?
The absence of self is often experienced by practitioners from Western culture as an absolute, unquestionable truth, which is consciously or unconsciously created out of identification with the words of the teacher. Thus, the idea of anatta becomes an ideal spiritual self for those who follow the path of Buddhism. Therefore, the “outbursts” of the existing self are accepted with forgiveness, and are perceived as an episode or random event that must be quickly overcome, and the practitioner returns to the accepted order and routine of practice in which he learns to create space between himself and his thoughts and thus free himself from unwanted thoughts or behavior. Thus, the practitioner who experiences in his daily life worries, anger, selfishness, or conflicts (which according to Buddhism are related to the five “poisons” mentioned) can calm down through awareness of passing thoughts, by saying (the thought) that the problem is “just a thought,” because this is the nature of the mind, and thus it deceives us.
However, the same technique that allows one to dismiss turbulent emotions and rationalize them by saying that “these are just thoughts” may be an opening to bypass inner distress and to fall asleep. Thus, the very aspiration to remove craving and clinging may lead to its suppression or removal from consciousness, thus causing the opposite result of the original intention: causing more suffering, and this time suffering that originates in the unconscious, a situation that Buddhism wants to eliminate from our lives. The striving to eliminate suffering can lead to processes of suppressing suffering and experiencing it, without us seeing it, defining it, remaining with it, or confronting it as an existential experience. In this way, the practice works to calm the feeling of suffering – and not necessarily to eradicate the suffering and its causes.
Welwood, a clinical psychologist, practitioner of Buddhism and author of many books and articles about the interface between East and West, offers an observation on the relationship between psychological work and spiritual work (Welwood, 2000). He says that early in his work, he began to notice that some Buddhist practitioners tended to use spiritual practice as a way to bypass or avoid dealing with “unclosed” personal and emotional matters. He writes about these “spiritual bypasses”:
This desire to find release from earthly structures that seem to entrap us – the structures of karma, conditioning, body, form, matter, personality – has been a central motive in the spiritual search for thousands of years. So there is often a tendency to use spiritual practice to try to rise above our emotional and personal issues – all those messy, unresolved matters that weigh us down. I call this tendency to avoid or prematurely transcend human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks spiritual bypassing (p.11-12).
According to Welwood, spiritual bypasses are a temptation for a person who has difficulty finding their way in the face of developmental difficulties and challenges in their life and existential dilemmas in family life and career. Sometimes spiritual detours help the practitioner cope with the spiritual group’s expectation of the individual within it to “release control” and give of himself, or they meet unmet needs, such as the need to be special, which may be satisfied through excellence and progress in practice, or through attempts to please and find favor in the eyes of the teacher. To avoid spiritual detours and move towards a higher truth, says Welwood, “it takes a willingness to walk and wade slowly in the water, and to enter among the turbulent waves of what appears within us.” Welwood suggests not being satisfied with “the usual equation – which offers a single choice between samsaric and dual consciousness and enlightened and non-dual consciousness,” and understanding “the way in which our experience moves and is embodied within the relationships between heaven and earth, between infinity within finitude, and eternity in the dimension of time” (Welwood, 2003: 159). In these words, Lewood calls for adopting the position of a careful and patient observer, to beware of the simplification of “either-or”. This is a journey into our inner space in which we encounter an inner world without a map, a world full of contradictions and contrasts, in which there are no shortcuts and victories.
Detours or defenses of the type described can also occur in various workshops for emotional or spiritual development – and also in the process of psychotherapy, when the therapist, the patient, or both, want improvement so much that they move too quickly to find solutions. The phenomenon known as “escape into health” is an example of such a detour, and it is especially prevalent today, in a time when short-term treatment has become so desired.
D - Self – Existent or non-existent?
Alongside Buddhism’s clear and emphatic statement about the absence of self, there is a confusing fog and a presentation of things and their opposites regarding the self. In my opinion, the meaning of the claim about the absence of self or self is unclear, and too sweeping. The claim does not distinguish between (a) self-functions that allow a person to function and trust himself, on the one hand (b) an experience of self-identity that expresses the internalization of mental representations and the continuity and consistency in the experience of selfhood (and see Welwood, 2000 for an extensive discussion of the issue), and (c) the question that Buddhism raises about the ontological non-existence of the self, the self as an unchanging “objective” reality.
According to the story (in Abe, 1998), when Buddha was asked “Does a self exist?” or “Doesn’t a self exist?” he answered both questions silently out of empathy for the questioner. According to Abe, “This silence does not express an agnostic position, but the truth and reality of the true nature of man, which is beyond positive and negative” (ibid., p. 185). It seems that a firm answer, whether positive or negative, would produce a separate attitude between “yes” and “no”, a dualistic consciousness – precisely what Buddhism wishes to move away from. According to psychiatrist and Buddhist practitioner Mark Epstein, “Buddha did not ignore the relative reality and the self that is revealed in it, but that we give this self a more absolute status than it deserves” (Epstein, 2007: 12).
Another example of the ambiguity in Buddhism’s treatment of the entity we call “I” is found in the interesting and instructive dialogue between Jean-François Ravel and Mathieu Ricard in their book “The Monk and the Philosopher” (1998):
Mathieu Ricard (the monk): “As for strengthening the personality, which is perceived as positive; this is contrary to Buddhism’s desire to expose the ‘pretense of the ego’, that ego that seems omnipotent and causes us great suffering, while it has no existence in itself. However, in the first stage, the sense of the ‘I’ must be stabilized in order to encompass all its characteristics. In other words, even if it sounds paradoxical, one must first have an ego in order to understand that it does not exist. Someone whose personality is unstable, divided, elusive, will have difficulty identifying the sense of the ‘I’ in order to understand, in the second stage, that this sense does not correspond to any real entity. One must therefore begin with a healthy and coherent ‘I’ in order to It can be analyzed. You can shoot at a target but not into a fog.” (p. 120)
These things present the paradoxical discourse in Buddhism on the nature of the self. It is possible to see how little is devoted to the experience of the self, to the process of its formation, to its necessity for functioning and the experience of self-perfection, and to the “stages” on the journey to enlightenment. Such a long road, with such a short discussion of the dialectic between being and nothingness that has always occupied thinkers in the West and the East. According to Ricard, first there must be a self (“healthy and coherent”) and only later does the insight that nothingness is real come. It is possible, then, that many who have not yet completed the “first stage […in which] all the characteristics of the self must be stabilized” practice Buddhism with the belief that the self is not real. How do we know, as practitioners, which “stage” we are at? Buddhism does encourage us to explore the noble truths for ourselves, but I have not found that such an investigation into the matter of the absence of self is done beyond light touches; The issue remains unspoken, without any meaningful discussion of the conflict between the personal experience of most of us that we do have a self – although it is not permanent, and after all, there is nothing permanent except change – and the noble truth that this experience has no real existence.
Western psychology, unlike Buddhism, devotes much to describing the self and seeks to investigate how such a self grows, and how it is sometimes damaged in the course of mental development. Psychotherapists meet many patients who have not formed a sense of their own self, who are perhaps in the “first stage”, and can see how great their suffering is: they have difficulty making a decision, identifying their own will, and remain stuck in a kind of painful sense of mental disability. The absence of self can be accompanied by an inability to separate different truths and aspects of our reality: over-identification, for example, weakens the practitioner’s ability to make the necessary distinctions between himself and others, between himself and the teacher, between the goal in the future and the present situation, and so on. In such a situation, the statement that “there is no self” can create fog and confusion. Perhaps, as Ricard suggested, a previous stage is necessary in which the individual develops an experience of separateness in order to be able to observe himself and what is beyond him, and in the process of practicing to expand consciousness from a mental center that allows for information processing and a learning experience. Welwood discusses the idea of the absence of self at length in the Buddhist context, and a study of his words gives the feeling that delving into the subject is like entering a tangled forest (Welwood, 2000). After all, in the development of a child, it is important to help him build an ego and a sense of self; and just as a child cannot become an adult prematurely, it is not possible for someone who begins to practice Buddhism to will initially adopt a truth that is completely contrary to his personal experience: a developmental process of growth and progress towards that truth is required. Moreover, the experience of the self can help the development of consciousness, as Buddha himself apparently experienced on his journey to enlightenment (and see Watson, 2008, Chapter 8). It seems to me that the ambiguity in defining the idea of the absence of self arises from the difficulty of identifying or defining the “self,” since according to Buddhism, as emerged from Buddha’s response presented above, the self cannot be denied nor can it be affirmed, that is, its existence and permanent validity cannot be “proved.” In my understanding, the idea of the absence of individual selfhood in Buddhism should not be accepted at face value, as an absolute truth valid in all circumstances and cultures; If we understand the self as being in process and becoming, and not as an “object,” an object placed on a table, as the existentialists say, we will recognize its importance to the development of man as an individual living and functioning in Western culture.
The Absence of Self as an Ethical and Educational Message
In contrast to the concept of anatta as an absolute truth from which everything flows, the claim about the absence of self can be understood as a truth that refers to the desired state, similar to the commandments “You shall not make for yourself an image” or “You shall not covet” in the Ten Commandments. According to this perspective, the truth of anatta expresses an ethical and educational message intended to divert believers from the path of attachment to an elusive self, in favor of the correct path to a moral life and enlightenment. This ethic rejects the belief in the solidity of the self by denying the inflated and narcissistic ego, the position of “I and nothing more,” in favor of directing attention to the existence, suffering, and happiness of the other. As Shantideva, an eighth-century Buddhist teacher (in Ravel and Ricard, 2000, p. 77):
All the good in the world
comes from the love of others
and all the evil
originates from the love of self.
What is the point of many words?
The self is related to its subject His
And the Buddha is concerned with the affairs of others:
See the difference for yourself!
Buddha was a social and spiritual reformer. In his sermons, one can find lessons, conclusions, instructions, and educational messages about the path that a person must take to eliminate suffering, feel compassion, and open up to light and enlightenment. According to a psychological biography of Buddha (Elder, 1998), Buddha himself was endowed with a strong sense of self that pushed him to act contrary to everything that was accepted in his environment and time and to strive resolutely for the destination he desired. His teachings on the absence of self were formulated after he reached enlightenment. Is it reasonable for us to begin our journey from the point where the Buddha was when he reached enlightenment, a situation that is comparable to the status of Mount Sinai? Perhaps we can follow the Buddha’s personal path on the journey to enlightenment: to enter the gate of Buddhism accompanied by the self that pushes us to transcend, and gradually to address the roots of the toxins and to transform the parts of the “lower self” within us, on our way to the light.
And – Closing Words
In this article, I have offered a look at some of the logical and psychological obstacles and paradoxes that arise from the contradiction that a person who practices the Buddhist path in Western culture can feel between the noble truth of selflessness and the personal experience of the reality of the self. This real or imagined contradiction confronts the practitioner with the difficulty of holding a stick at both ends.
According to Peled (2005), there is a lack of structure in our language, since it describes everything through a world of concepts, which are suitable for describing objects and not living processes – which entails an epistemological problem in the human ability to know and recognize the truth. Thus, the Buddhist practitioner can find it difficult to remain in the conceptual and procedural ambiguity and to move between the extremes, between what he experiences – and what he describes in words – and the model that the Buddha presents conceptually, despite everything.
Awareness of the developmental processes that are present in everything, processes of becoming and transformation, can help a person move from a consciousness or experience of existence as a separate and self-fortified individual to a person with a more universal consciousness that goes beyond the individual self. When a person can free himself from egocentrism and his defenses, he becomes able to awaken and discover the illusion and limitation of a separate self and to be open out of compassion to the existence of the other (see: Welwood, 2000; Epstein, 2007; Watson, 2008). Buddha was probably the good teacher and parent who wanted to save us from ourselves, but he cannot spare us from walking in the wilderness and the necessity of choosing our own path.
Psychological Support:
Psychological Support: Like any addiction recovery process, detox from Subutex includes psychological support. This can involve counseling, therapy, or support groups to address the mental and emotional aspects of addiction.
