I greatly enjoyed reading Mike Slott's book, Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue. This led me to further reflections of my own on some of the topics addressed in the book: particularly the topics of self and non-self, truth as statements corresponding to reality (as far as we know), and the superiority conceit.
I would suppose most people who are attracted to Buddhism are attracted to the aim of ending suffering, or at least, lessening it. I know I certainly was, and in 40 years of practice, my suffering (mostly emotional) has greatly decreased. But is part of the practice to lose the "self"? Does anyone practice to lose themselves?
I do accept traditional Buddhist arguments against a permanent entity called the "self". The arguments are logical and valid. The "self", to be brief, are processes of varying lengths of duration, and essentially, a linguistic convention. But why do people act so contrary to this teaching, even in historically Buddhist communities and countries? Is it only a failure to completely understand the teaching?
Sometimes, it seems to me, that the ontological argument against the self is almost a straw-man argument. Sometimes, when led by our desires, we do think and act like it's our individual selves against the whole world. But is that really our concept of our self?
Who is myself? If you ask most people who they are, they will probably give you their name, gender, nationality, and possibly their religion. But their name includes their family name, and part of a person's concept of self is relationship to family, and often ethnic and cultural identifications. Each of these self-identifications have emotional attachments, and needless to say, sometimes extremely strong emotional attachments. Is this bad?
Much of modern psychotherapy is concerned with a person’s self-conceptualizations, not some sort of absolute self-identify. I was a practicing psychotherapist for 35 years; many of my clients suffered some kind of psychological disorder, often anxiety or depression or both. Many people who are depressed suffer low self-esteem.
Freud made a distinction between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. In brief, we can think of primary narcissism as a positive emotional attachment to our own body (and mind), and its health and well-being. It's the desire to be healthy and well-functioning. Secondary narcissism could be defined as our emotional attachments to our concepts of ourself; and herein is where problems seem to lie.
In Mike's book, he refers to Bhikkhu Analayo's writing on the superiority conceit, which since I've not read the article appears to be about Buddhist sects’ internal struggles for dominance.
But the superiority conceit (or complex) ranges widely in human behavior. People are constantly forming hierarchies of one kind or another, trying to find ways they are superior to others because they are a particular ethnicity, culture, nationality, class, religion, or sex. It contributes to racism, classism, sexism, and a great deal of human suffering.
It is one thing to have a healthy attachment to one’s own person, family, culture, nation, or religion. It is another to denigrate, disparage, or try to suppress or eliminate others merely because they are different.
Gautama Siddhartha made a distinction between wholesome and unwholesome dispositions and behaviors. In today's psychology, therapists make a distinction between healthy self-concepts and unhealthy ones. Some of the most disruptive or unhealthy self-conceptualizations and their attendant behaviors are the personality disorders of narcissism, paranoia, and sociopathy.
In my 35 years of the practice of psychotherapy, I relatively rarely met clients who would be clearly diagnosed as having a categorical personality disorder. However, many people can have some degree or other of pathological traits. When political leaders who have very high levels of these characteristics rise in power, it can be disastrous for the political life of a nation. Incessant claims that the nation, culture, or religion is the greatest that ever existed and must be supreme, appeal to the person's secondary and unhealthy narcissism. Political leaders who over-stress the negative aspects or dangers of other nations, cultures, or religions can generate a kind of mass paranoia.
Today in America, a White Christian Nationalism (which has been here for a long time) has arisen again to political influence, even though it represents a little less than 30% of the American population, but it is fervent and has a distinctly authoritarian orientation that is contrary to the principles of our country's founding.
In his book, Mike warns against belief in truth with a capital T, i.e., an absolute truth. It is a warning against dogmatism and fanaticism. Absolutism, dogmatism, and megalomania have a tendency to walk hand-in-hand.
Many phenomena exist on a continuum. Some ideas start out small and innocuous. We learn, we overlearn, to form habits, and when we engage in systematic thinking, we develop belief systems. These systems can be true (as far as we know) or not true, or some mixture of true and not true. But the more we commit to believe, the more fixed the belief or belief-system becomes. Finally, if the belief-system becomes so fixed that it is impervious to contrary evidence or logic, it becomes delusion. (Or to put it more mildly, becomes myth.) This has important cultural and political relevance. Constant exposure to hearing one ideologically-driven narrative with attendant partial truths, myths, or outright lies can cause ordinary people to become fanatics. We need to adhere to facts and critical thinking.
We may be in what is an essentially non-violent civil war, and impending series of constitutional crises. Do we still follow the Constitution as it was written and amended by our ancestors or do we change our system of government to a Presidential dictatorship? It is not only a political crisis; it's a cultural one as well. A political leader cannot be elected without significant elements of that leader's character being prominent in the population. Elements of personal narcissism, paranoia, and sociopathic disregard for others seem prominent in our culture. Our Founding Fathers were concerned above all with the common good. Are we?
Aside from our practices of the Buddha dharma to keep our own sanity, what can we do as individuals?
- Support organizations that promote tolerance, civil and human rights, and an open society: organizations like the ACLU, Common Cause, and Public Citizen, to name just a few.
- Support institutions that promote independent, objective sources of knowledge, by supporting a) science and b) independent journalism, particularly publicly owned sources such as PBS and NPR.
- Don't buy into the corruption of language. Authoritarians started calling themselves "conservatives" decades ago. This is a colonization and corruption of language that even liberal and independent media have adopted unthinkingly. If you believe a president can systematically circumvent Congress and the courts, you're an authoritarian, not a conservative.
- Support religious tolerance by supporting ecumenicalism and interfaith dialogue.
- If you are raising or educating children, teach them to be caring toward others and to take responsibility for their mistakes. Two of the traits common to Narcissistic personality, Paranoid personality, and Sociopathic personality is a significant lack of empathy and an inability to accept responsibility for anything they do that's wrong.
- Support Indivisible.
What do readers think?
3 Replies to “Engaged Buddhism, Modern Psychology, and the Sometimes-Impassioned Attachments to Concepts of Self”
Excellent discussion of the attachments to our concepts of self and identity in modern psychotherapy. However, while the concern is “with a person’s self-conceptualizations” rather than “some sort of absolute identity,” this may ignore a deeper level of attachment. One way to interpret the way in which Buddhism’s critique of the self may represent a deeper level of attachment is to consider the way these various self-conceptualizations may attach themselves to the idea of some permanent essential core that is our “true” identity. It is this attachment which can generate not just our neurotic sufferings but our fundamental existential suffering, and this is where Buddhism comes in.
Dear Roy,
I find your article to be a wonderful prompt to affirm my “dharmic citizenship”—to borrow a useful phrase from Winton Higgins—and to speak up with you in support of the public good. You describe our lives today as “an essentially non-violent civil war, and impending series of constitutional crises,” and link our cultural character to that of our craven, dictatorial political leaders. I agree, and feel at once frightened and confused that I consent to be governed by governing powers which no longer represent me in any way at all.
For months now I’ve been thinking along with the great communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who in writing his Prison Notebooks managed to live as a public intellectual within the most repressive fascist regime of Mussolini. Gramsci wrote that the “ crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena appear.” And further: “At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organizational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny.’”
Thank you for your wise recommendations about “what to do” as individuals.
Thank you for an excellent essay from the Buddhist and psychologist’s viewpoint which I think is rather rare.
I have yet to read Mike’s book.
Today we have so many lenses to observe Buddhism through including psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, which I think is good thing for new interpretations and the reassessment of a massive body of work that has grown from the Buddha’s formidable teachings many hundreds of years ago.
My background is from science including physics and chemistry as well as post graduate studies in Western philosophy, but I’ve also had an interest in Eastern philosophies including Daoism, Vedic or Sanātana Dharma, and both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism for many years. My first encounter with Buddhism goes back to when I was eight years of age when I was intrigued by the non-sequitur nature of Zen Buddhist koans. I was born in the same year as Stephen Bachelor.
I have had several flashes in my life when I think I have been affected by what the Tibetans like to call ‘Dzogchen’: a sudden flash of a different existential state. None of these Dzogchen-like experiences were the direct result of being in the presence of a known Dzogchen master.
Although I am trained in science, I’m also aware that science is mainly restricted to what we know, not what we don’t know. Long ago, Albert Einstein is quoted to have said: “we still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.” In my opinion not a lot has changed since then despite much research and technological innovation. So my view is that our basic condition is still ignorance, even though science has been an exceedingly useful tool in promoting our survival and establishing many inductive and sometimes deductive truths in a physical world. Another line of thought which also concerns me is that religious absolutism witnessed such things as countless witches tortured and burned at the stake so naivety in religious belief is not an option for me either.
When I studied philosophy I came to the conclusion there was no god or afterlife having been brought up to believe in a Christian god. But my last Dzogchen-like experience – another one that seemed to come out of nowhere (but this time related to adversity) – has made me question what is really going on in this universe. As a Buddhist it has brought me via meditative and mindfulness practice to come to the view that there are two selves, one true and the other false.
This most recent experience – which continues to further reveal itself from behind a kind of fading cloud – from my own research has been known by many synonyms and metaphors: Tibetans and others associate this with the clear blue sky, or it can be compared to a reflective mirror. Padmasambhava called it intrinsic awareness, and the Daoists named it original heaven, or primordial awareness. Through my own observation it is like a witness-self, a sense of presence, or what I also now call ‘amness’. For me it is an unwavering substrate of true self-identity and where my state of ‘I’ really exists. All thoughts and feelings can occur within this space or as reflections in the mirror if that Tibetan metaphor is chosen. Only sign posts and pointers can be used to describe this state, but that still does not make it easy to do. It brings with it a sense of radiating love (from the heart region), absolute peace, spacious-consciousness beyond the body, and inner light and sound observed during extended meditation. Some of these states may be what Buddhists call the Jnanas. I am most certainly not claiming to be enlightened or awakened like a Buddha at all, nothing of the sort, but I know I have been very fortunate to have had a glimpse of something way beyond the usual states I have previously experienced, and I have much work to do to align further with this sense of genuine self-presence which in itself never changes. My normal conscious experience is noticeably changed and what I describe above is present all the time yet still occasionally clouded by challenging negative emotions and thoughts.
The other concept of self I speak of, and one that can usher in darker clouds and distractions, is what many Buddhists have traditionally called the ‘ego’ although it is not the same as Freud’s version.
As many would know, the Buddhist concept of ego is divided into 5 Aggregates or Skandas. The three major ones – body, thoughts, and feelings – are all impermanent and empty according the Buddha’s teachings, i.e. they have no solid or permanent nature or essence. They seem to automatically originate within this field of presence. I have concluded that the state I outline in my previous paragraph is the master while the ego should act as servant. The latter has probably evolved to serve as a useful tool, but if it gets out of hand it can be a very deceptive and destructive entity. The servant can override the master and this where suffering comes from. It seems from my experience to be also linked with the automatic processes of the subconscious mind. It is important to learn to patiently work with it but never reject it. It can create a false sense of self that masquerades as a true self.
The Tibetan Wheel of Life image familiar to Mahayana Buddhists has an outer circle that illustrates the 12 links of dependent origination. It indicates (in the two first upper right hand images) a blind man walking through a forest symbolising that our thoughts are often formed out of ignorance and are also like the clay pots a potter makes: some good, some bad. The ego produces automatic thoughts and feelings, and most of us would know that they are very hard to stop even through many years of meditation practice. Learning to stop negative thoughts and feelings, and gain some control over mind results in being a happier person. Most meditators know this. It can also help us gain some control over relentless desires and compulsive behaviours.
If the ego dominates and we reach a state of craving or Upādāna, it can lead to many unpleasant psychological states, reactive behaviours, and in some cases may lead to neurosis, psychosis, addictions, and possibly personality disorders in conjunction with upbringing and socialisation (I am not a psychologist so this is only an unqualified suggestion based on experience). Of course genetic factors are likely as well.
I think we can be looking for happiness in all the wrong places when it can be better found nearby and within, by focussing on the other self I have described above.
Such things as pathological narcissism and megalomania would appear to be the antithesis of the Buddha’s teachings. If the ego gains complete control over one’s thoughts and feelings and clouds us from the genuine sense of self, then things just get worse.
At present I personally do not know if the first self that I speak of is material or non-material and thus something unacceptable to modern scientific understanding and secularism. But it may not matter how we see it because approaching anywhere near this state, and it seems to happen for longer periods of time though meditation and mindfulness, brings happiness, gratitude, compassion, and feelings of outward love towards all people while providing far less likelihood of being entrapped by the negative aspects of the ego.
It is my conclusion through my own life experience that the only thing I can really control is my ego or false sense of self, and when I do that then the blue sky self increasingly shines through. As a result I can actually be a better more ethically guided person and help build a better society for everyone. It follows that with every choice I make, or what life brings to me whether through good fortune, adversity, or the moral imperative to act, I can therefore decide to do whatever is of most benefit to all.