The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (4 page)

On his tiny platform suspended over the rushing waters of the Ganges, Devraha Baba looked at Allen. He tilted his head from side to side and sucked his teeth.

“Oh!” he exclaimed. And with a tenderness that struck deep at Allen’s heart, he said softly: “How wounded, how wounded.”
¹⁰

Devraha’s intervention, subtle though it was, captures the essence of the Buddha’s approach to developmental trauma. In his gentle, caring, but unsparing and unsentimental way, the Baba’s retort helped bring Ginsberg’s self-identification as a wounded soul into awareness. He focused all of his light on Ginsberg’s darkest spot. The wounded nature of Ginsberg’s self, originating perhaps in the childhood loss of his mother to psychosis but fed by the lability of his relationship with Orlovsky, may have been fundamental to Ginsberg’s identity, but it was not something he had yet completely admitted to. Of note is the Baba’s refusal to try to do anything about Ginsberg’s plight. He did not counsel Ginsberg about his true nature, he did not urge him to meditate the feelings away, nor did he try to fill the emptiness of Ginsberg’s soul. He simply noted the truth compassionately. To progress on the spiritual path, Ginsberg, who some years later embraced Buddhism, had to start where he was.

The observational posture that Buddhist psychology counsels is sometimes called bare attention. Its nakedness refers to the absence of reactivity in its response, to its pure and unadorned relatedness. Bare attention has been defined as the “clear and single-minded awareness of what happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception.”
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In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, this is sometimes evoked through the setting up of what is called a spy consciousness in the corner of the mind, watching or feeling everything that unfolds in the theater of the mind and body. Sometimes called mindfulness, it is described using metaphors ranging from climbing a tall water tower to look down from above to acting like a surgeon’s probe, going deep into the afflicted area. This combination of detachment and engagement is characteristic of the attentional stance that is recommended. Bare attention also has a quality of renunciation to it. It asks us to defer our usual reactions in the service of something less egocentric; the instructions are not to cling to what is pleasant and not to reject what is unpleasant—to simply be with things as they are. If reactions occur (which they inevitably do), they too become grist for the mill, but they are never privileged. The idea is to let them settle down so that things can be known simply for what they are. This quality of renunciation is critical to the Buddha’s method; it is what he learned from his six years of ascetic practices in the forest.

One of the central paradoxes of Buddhism is that the bare attention of the meditative mind changes the psyche by not trying to change anything at all. The steady application of the meditative posture, like the steadiness of an attuned parent, allows something inherent in the mind’s potential to emerge, and it emerges naturally if left alone properly in a good enough way. When the Dalai Lama summarized his scholarly teachings on Buddhist thought with the paradoxical injunction “Transform your thoughts but remain as you are,” he was pointing to this phenomenon. The thoughts he was after are rooted in the way we seek relief by finding someone or something to blame. The trauma within prompts us to search for a culprit, and we all too often attack ourselves or our loved ones in an attempt to eradicate the problem. This splitting of the self against itself or against its world only perpetuates suffering. The Buddha’s method was to do something out of the ordinary, to make his mind like that of a mother: the most taken-for-granted person in our world but the missing ingredient in his. Adopting this stance creates room for a transformation that is waiting to happen, one that cannot occur unless one’s inner environment is recalibrated in a specific way.

This understanding is not entirely outside the range of contemporary psychotherapy. It was articulated with great care by one of the first therapists to actually observe mothers interacting with their infants in a clinical setting. D. W. Winnicott, a British pediatrician and child analyst, wrote a lot about the quality of attunement he saw in “good-enough” mothers, a quality he called a mother’s primary preoccupation:

In this state mothers become able to put themselves into the infant’s shoes, so to speak. That is to say, they develop an amazing capacity for identification with the baby, and this makes them able to meet the basic needs of the infant in a way that no machine can imitate, and no teaching can reach. . . .

An infant who is held well enough is quite a different thing from one who has not been held well enough. . . . The reason why this special property of infant care must be mentioned, even in this brief statement, is that in the early stages of emotional development, before the senses have been organised, before there is something that could be called an autonomous ego, very severe anxieties are experienced. In fact, the word “anxiety” is of no use, the order of infant distress at this stage being of the same order as that which lies behind panic, and panic is already a defence against the agony that makes people commit suicide rather than remember. I have meant to use strong language here. You see two infants; one has been held (in my extended sense of the word) well enough, and there is nothing to prevent a rapid emotional growth, according to inborn tendencies. The other has not had the experience of being held well and growth has had to be distorted and delayed, and some degree of primitive agony has to be carried on into life and living. Let it be said that in the common experience of good-enough holding the mother has been able to supply an auxiliary ego-function, so that the infant has had an ego from an early start, a very feeble, personal ego, but one boosted by the sensitive adaptation of the mother and by her ability to identify with her infant in relation to basic needs. The infant who has not had this experience has either needed to develop premature ego functioning, or else there has developed a muddle.
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Primitive agony was one of Winnicott’s most important concepts; it was the aspect of the Buddha’s
dukkha
that he was most attuned to. In describing how a mother helps her child get to know feelings through her holding of him, Winnicott also painted the picture of how it must feel for an infant to be deprived of such holding. He spoke of an order of distress behind panic and deliberately conjured suicide as an expression of the inexpressible agony an infant faces if left too much in the dark. While he stressed that most parents protect their children as best they can from such feelings, he also implied that such anxieties were always lurking. Like the relational therapists who followed in his wake, he was attuned to the “enduring, crushing meanings” unbearable affect states could evoke. His insights help explain a hidden and powerful aspect of the therapy the Buddha devised. Whether or not the historical Buddha actually suffered from the kind of primitive agonies Winnicott expounded upon, the meditations he taught in the aftermath of his awakening “hold” the mind just as Winnicott described a mother “holding” an infant. In making the observational posture of mindfulness central to his technique, the Buddha established another version of “an auxiliary ego-function” in the psyches of his followers, one that enabled them, to go back to his metaphor of pulling out an arrow, to tend to their own wounds with both their minds and their hearts. Far from eliminating the ego, as I naively believed I should when I first began to practice meditation, the Buddha encouraged a strengthening of the ego so that it could learn to hold primitive agonies without collapse.

A friend of mine who spent years in India with a great teacher from the ancient forest tradition tells a moving story that, to my mind, makes the same point. Years after his beloved teacher had died, he was back in India staying at the home of his guru’s most devoted Indian disciple.

“I must show you something,” the disciple said to my friend one day. “This is what he left for me.” My friend was excited, of course. Any trace of his teacher was nectar to him. He watched as the elderly man opened the creaking doors of an ancient wooden wardrobe and took something from the back of the bottom shelf. It was wrapped in an old, dirty cloth.

“Do you see?” he asked my friend.

“No. See what?”

The disciple unwrapped the object, revealing an old, beat-up aluminum pot, the kind of ordinary pot one sees in every Indian kitchen. Looking deeply into my friend’s eyes, he told him, “He left this for me when he went away. Do you see? Do you see?”

“No, Dada,” he replied. “I don’t see.”

According to my friend, Dada looked at him even more intensely, this time with a mad glint in his eyes.

“You don’t have to shine,” he said. “
You don’t have to shine
.”
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He rewrapped the pot and put it back on the bottom shelf of the wardrobe.

My friend had received the most important teaching, one that had its origins in the Buddha’s revolutionary approach. He did not have to transform himself in the way he imagined: He just had to learn to be kind to himself. If he could hold himself with the care Dada showed while clutching the old pot, it would be enough. His ordinary self, wrapped in all of its primitive agony, was precious too.

Everything Is Burning

T
he Buddha did shine, of course, as his erstwhile friend Upaka could not help but notice. One of the names he was called in the ancient sutras was “
”: he who shines brilliantly, while emitting multicolored flames, or rays of light, from his body.
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It might be hard to reconcile the Buddha’s shining countenance with what my friend learned in India about leaving his unpolished flaws alone, but the two are actually related. The Buddha shone because the fires of his own attachments blew out. He was not trying to shine: It happened when he stopped fighting with himself, when he became able to hold his anguish as tenderly as Dada held that old aluminum pot his guru had left for him.

The Buddha began to talk about this almost immediately after his enlightenment. Newly awakened and finding the voice that came to be called his “Lion’s Roar,” he began to put words on his breakthrough. He followed up his first sermon, the one on the Four Noble Truths given to his five former friends on the outskirts of Benares, with his next-most-famous teaching, known colloquially as the Fire Sermon. While the first teaching had been given almost privately to his five former companions, this one had an audience of a thousand matted-haired, fire-worshipping ascetics, drawn like moths to a flame.

News of the Buddha’s attainments had spread fast. Camps of wandering sadhus coalesced around him, curious to see what he was made of. The Buddha, as was his wont, engaged them by focusing on what they were most attached to and most interested in. In a rare exercise of his miraculous powers, he made it impossible for them to tend their sacred fires without his intervention. When they tried to split their logs according to the apocryphal story, they could not, until the Buddha said the magic word. When they tried to light their fires, they were similarly restrained, and when they tried to put their fires out, they could not do that either. The Buddha even materialized five hundred braziers for the ascetics to warm themselves with in the midst of the coldest winter night and then pushed back the floodwaters after a terrible storm so that he could walk on dry ground. The ancient sutras spell out these displays as if they were facts, but the miraculous feats were not the main point. The Buddha was speaking the fire worshippers’ language. He knew how to get their attention. Having roused their curiosity, he offered them a teaching. He then took their devotion to their sacred fires and turned it inside out. He had done the same thing in his first talk by giving new meaning to the word “noble,” which until that point had been used exclusively to demarcate the upper-caste Brahmins in ancient India’s stratified society. The noble person wasn’t noble by virtue of the caste he was born into, the Buddha suggested then; he was noble because he could see the truth. Nobility came from within, he insisted; it was not a product of one’s hereditary place in society.

In the case of the Fire Sermon, the Buddha did something similar. Whether or not he actually performed physical miracles, he did something miraculous with his language. He took the literal meaning of the word “fire” and turned it into a metaphor. The actual translation of the sutra’s Pali name,
, is “The Way of Putting Things as Being on Fire,” which conveys the Buddha’s metaphorical intent.
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The matted-haired ascetics, ritualistically tending their sacred fires, were missing the point. Rather than being so concrete about it, he suggested to the mass of
bhikkhus
, or mendicants (literally, ones who live by alms), arrayed before him, that they should see the flames all around them. Everyday life is a trauma, the Buddha proclaimed: It is as if everything is burning. He spoke of trauma as if it were a fire.

Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is all that is burning?

The eye is burning. Visible forms are burning. Eye-consciousness is burning. Eye-contact is burning. Also feeling, whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair, I say.

The ear is burning. Sounds are burning. . . .

The nose is burning. Odors are burning. . . .

The tongue is burning. Flavors are burning. . . .

The body is burning. Tangibles are burning. . . .

The mind is burning. Mental objects are burning.
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With this single metaphor, the Buddha managed to consolidate the most important strands of his thought. He took the sacred fires of his listeners and not only put them out but stripped them of their idealized status. Rites and rituals will get you nowhere, he declared. And he used his metaphorical imagery to drive home his vision of the ubiquity of trauma. Everyday life is on fire not only because of how fleeting it is, which we know but don’t like to admit, but also because of how ardently we cling to our own greed, anger, and egocentric preoccupations. He called these the “three fires,” in another punning play on the three “sacrificial fires” a devout Brahmin householder was committed to tending daily.
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We don’t have to tend the fires purposively and obsessively, he told his listeners—we are constantly feeding the three egocentric fires unconsciously. Hundreds of years later, when the semantic origins of the “three fires” were long forgotten, greed, hatred, and delusion came to be known in the Buddhist world as the three “poisons,” but this was not a word that the Buddha actually used. His initial language, while strong, was more forgiving than that. Subliminally, the Buddha was saying, we are all tending these fires (of greed, hatred, and delusion), motivated as we are by our insecure place in the world, by the feeling, the
dukkha
, of not fitting in. The fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are defenses against acknowledging that everything is on fire, instinctive attempts at protecting ourselves from what feels like an impossible situation. The Buddha stressed the burning nature of the world in order to show his listeners what they were afraid of. By placing their spiritual aspirations outside themselves they were shoring up their egocentric defenses. Only by looking into the traumas they were made of could they find release.

He continued to use this imagery when describing his awakening. “
” (
in Pali) means “going out.” The word is derived from the Sanskrit root
va-
, meaning “to blow,” and the prefix
nir
, meaning “cease to burn” or “go out” (like a flame).
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But the verb is intransitive and—this is important—it means that there is no agent doing the blowing, no
one
who causes the flame to go out. “
” means “going out”: It just happens when conditions are right; no one makes it happen. The fires of trauma—of greed, hatred, and delusion and of birth, aging, and death—are self-liberating. They blow out when conditions in the mind are right. The first step, as the Buddha described in the Fire Sermon, is to deal with the fear we harbor about the traumatic nature of things. This fear leads us either to ignore the flames we are made of or to hope that, through some magic, it might be possible to get rid of them altogether. But the flames can go out only when we stop pretending they are not there.

As moving as this aspect of the Fire Sermon may be, this is not the end of the Buddha’s use of the metaphor. It is the so-called negative view of nirvana but not the only way of describing it. The positive view points to the underlying nature of reality. It tends to imply, erroneously, that nirvana is a place or a state to be achieved, something apart from the everyday world. Nevertheless, at times the Buddha leaned toward this description. He used a different word, one that sounded similar but came from different roots and carried a vastly different meaning (
nirvrti
in Sanskrit
or nibbuti
in Pali).
means “bliss,”
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and there is a related word meaning “blissful” that describes how the world appears when the wisdom eye is opened. “When the fires of passion, hatred and delusion die out within one,” writes Richard Gombrich, one of Oxford’s foremost scholars of the Buddha’s thought, “one experiences bliss.”
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Everything is burning, then, not only with impermanence and pain but also with bliss. The vision of one leads to the knowledge of the other.