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Reprinted with permission from Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, Fall 2005.
Reviewed by Antonio Wood
Boulder, Colorado, the summer of 1978. After completing a medical residency in psychiatry at Yale University, I had just moved to Boulder with my family. I was working at the Student Health Center of the University of Colorado and teaching a class at The Naropa Institute, in the psychology program. One Friday evening there was a reception planned for the faculty: Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the president of the institute, would be present, and the faculty would have a chance to meet him. After hearing many stories about Rinpoche, I was curious to meet him.
When I arrived, he was holding court in a large room. A long line of people waiting to talk to him had formed at the door. He would talk with each person for a few minutes, inquiring about their lives or work. I waited in line for a long time, until finally my turn came to be introduced. I stood by his chair while one of his students introduced me: "This is Dr. Wood. He is teaching a class in the psychology program." Rinpoche looked at me and asked, "Wood?" while touching the wooden arm of his chair. "Yes, Wood," I said. "Wood?" he inquired again, and this time he bent down to touch the wooden floor. "Yes, Wood," I said. Again he asked, "Wood?" touching the wooden table next to him. "Yes! Wood!" I repeated, getting increasingly annoyed. Strangely, he kept repeating "Wood?" and touching wooden objects. It was a bizarre interaction. I thought he was drunk. But he kept asking the same question, over and over again, intently, gently, and relentlessly. And then my mind stopped, and I relaxed. My irritation disappeared and I stopped trying to figure out what was happening. Exactly at that moment, he smiled and said, "Nice meeting you." We laughed, and I left. For a while I couldn't find the restart button for my mind.
All of Rinpoche's extraordinarily abundant teachings, and his interactions with students, pointed in the same direction: the nature of mind, and our ultimate nature as human beings. The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology is an excellent compilation of his teachings on psychology. It is particularly helpful to those who work in the healing professions, including psychology.
Psychology is the science of the mind, but what is the mind? The Oxford English
Dictionary defines mind as "the seat of a person's consciousness, thoughts, volitions, and feelings; the system of cognition and emotional phenomena and powers that constitutes the subjective being of a person; also, the incorporeal subject of the psychological faculties, the spiritual part of a human being, the soul as distinguished from the body." This equating mind with spirit or soul is perhaps at the root of the modern confusion about "mental illness," illustrated in the separation of medical care, based in hospitals, and mental health care, based in mental health centers across the country.
Since Descartes published his thesis about body and mind three centuries ago, philosophers have battled over which entity, mind or matter, was the basic stuff of the world. Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and James contended that matter is but a uniquely objective and substantial form of mind, a position not very different from that held by many contemporary physicists, who believe that matter is merely a concentrated form of energy. On the other side, thinkers such as Hobbes, Marx, Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Dennett have argued that mind is in essence nothing but matter; in other words, mind is only what the brain does.
Buddhism maintains that at the root of our many psychological and emotional problems lies a fundamental misconception of reality. We have an innate belief in the existence of things as they appear to us, and we are ignorant of the discrepancy between the appearances and their true mode of existence, much like our belief, when we are in the dream state, that the appearances in our dreams are real. Because of this belief, we automatically grasp on to things as objects that possess essential natures, and this leads to confusion, psychological disturbances, and so forth. A brief illustration of this point: as you read these words they appear to be on the paper that you are holding. But we could argue that all of your experience, including the words, the paper, and your sense of touch, is actually "in your head," the experiencing of your brain function. Ultimately, neither these letters nor the person beholding them have independent, essential natures.
In Buddhism, mind cannot be understood in isolation from the body. Mind is not so much a substantial entity independent of the body but a dynamic process intimately connected with the physiological states of the body. Trungpa Rinpoche was the first to introduce these concepts to the West in a language easily understood by a culture familiar with psychologists like James, Freud, Jung, and Perls, among many others. He introduced Buddhism and Buddhist psychology in an extraordinarily direct language, by speaking directly of our immediate experience. In Garuda, a 1976 publication put out by Vajradhatu Publications, he analyzes ego in a way that contrasts greatly with the Western notion of ego, by describing its origin:
Meditation is a way of working with the neurosis of ego, so in order to understand the psychology of meditation we must understand the dynamics of that neurosis. According to Buddhist psychology, the basis of ego is the tendency to solidify energy into a barrier that separates space into two entities, I and Other, the space in here and the space out there. This process is technically termed dualistic fixation. First there is the initial creation of the barrier, which is the sensing of other, and then the inference of inner or I. This is the birth of ego. We identify with what is in here and struggle to relate to what is out there. The barrier causes an imbalance between inside and outside. The struggle to redress that imbalance further solidifies the wall. The irony of the barrier-creating process is that we lose track of the fact that we have created the barrier and, instead, act as if it was always there. After the initial creation of I and Other, I feels the territory outside itself, determining if it is threatening, attractive, or uninteresting.
Trungpa Rinpoche goes on to describe the further development of ego all the way into neurosis and psychosis, which he describes as "losing contact with the ground." His teachings on Maitri Space Awareness practice are a direct way for practitioners and nonpractitioners alike to experience directly the process just described.
Western psychology is increasingly concerned with fundamental issues, such as the nature of mind, the relationship of brain and mind, the limits of human potential for growth, the possibilities for mental health, and the means for change and transformation. This new compilation of talks is an excellent introduction to Rinpoche's unique contribution to this investigation.
The Sanity We Are Born With is divided into three main parts. The first section introduces the means to explore the questions of mind through meditation practices, starting with one's own mind as the ground for understanding others. Trungpa Rinpoche writes, "The practice of meditation is based, not on how we would like things to be, but on what is. We often do not have a proper understanding of what we are, of what we are actually doing. Instead our attention is focused on the possible end product of the process we are involved in."
The second section explains mind from the perspective of the insight gained through practice. Tibetan Buddhism has perhaps the most sophisticated phenomenological model and detailed analyses of mental states, cognition, and consciousness of any psychology, while at the same time emphasizing that none of the descriptions, teachings, and texts should be taken as articles of faith or dogma. Rather, every step of the way should be explored and validated personally through study, practice, and one's own experience. Trungpa Rinpoche introduces the development of ego, the eight consciousnesses, and the five buddha families, which are the basis for understanding Maitri Space Awareness practice introduced in the third part.
The third section talks about psychology, health and healing, and the training of health professionals and psychotherapists. It includes an article written in the early 1970's, before Maitri Space Awareness practice became a cornerstone for the training of psychotherapists at Naropa University.
In the last chapter, Rinpoche discusses the question "Is meditation therapy?" The answer is no. Here he addresses a fundamental issue: what is the highest potential we have as human beings? We can use psychology or meditation or Buddhism to make our life better, nicer, or easier. There is nothing wrong with that. But, as he points out, meditation is about "unconditional freedom."
Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings point to our ultimate nature of basic goodness and health. I find it helpful to read his teachings with an "open ear," without filtering, categorizing, or trying to achieve a translation into familiar terms. His speech was, and is, mantra—immediate transmission, if we open ourselves to it.
Antonio Wood is a psychiatrist living in Boulder, Colorado. He was a student of the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. |
