Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

by Mark Epstein

being truthful about one’s inability to meet all of one’s child’s needs, a disappointing parent moves a child toward a capacity to cope with everyday life.

there is trauma at the heart of existence.

The monkey crouching with his hands over his ears is the perfect image of a thinker paralyzed by his own thoughts, oblivious to the sounds of liberation all around him.

I was struck by the number of teachers I have had who had nothing to do with my orthodox schooling or training.

Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein.

James was one of the first to appreciate the psychological dimension of Buddhist thought,

the Buddhist approach requires that all of the psyche be subject to meditative awareness.

Meditation is not world denying; the slowing down that it requires is in service of closer examination of the day-to-day mind.

the true nature of the self and to end the production of self-crea...

it long ago perfected a technique of confronting and uprooting human narcissism,

James, Jung, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and Joseph Campbell,

Western therapists are in the position of having identified a potent source of neurotic misery without having developed a foolproof treatment for it.

For Buddhism, like the Western traditions that followed many centuries later, is, in its psychological form, a depth psychology.

“Keep that don’t-know mind!”

The essential point is that as long as beings are driven by greed, hatred, and delusion—forces represented in the center of the circle by a pig, a snake, and a rooster attempting to devour one another—they will remain ignorant of their own Buddha-nature; ignorant of the transitory, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory nature of the world; and bound to the Wheel of Life.

the causes of suffering are also the means of release; that is, the sufferer’s perspective determines whether a given realm is a vehicle for awakening or for bondage.

According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.

“When all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.”

learn how to see clearly.

nirvana is samsara—that there is no separate Buddha realm apart from worldly existence, that release from suffering is won through a change in perception, not through a migration to some kind of heavenly abode.

We have ample opportunity to practice the methods of re-possessing or re-membering that are specifically taught in meditation, for we can practice on all of the material of the six realms, on all of the sticking points in our minds.

the formation of character, the personality is built on these points of self-estrangement; the paradox is that what we take to be so real, our selves, is constructed out of a reaction against just what we do not wish to acknowledge.

The Human Realm suffuses all of the others, then: it is the linchpin of the wheel, the domain of Narcissus, in search of himself and captured by his own reflection.

the Hell Realms are vivid descriptions of aggressive and anxiety states; beings are seen burning with rage or tortured by anxiety.

They do not recognize their torturers as products of their own minds, however. They believe themselves to be tortured by outside forces over which they have no control.

The Bodhisattva of Compassion is sometimes inset into the Hell Realm holding a mirror or a purifying flame, indicating that this suffering can only be alleviated by seeing the unwanted emotions in the mirror. When so recognized, the emotions themselves become healing (a point that was not lost on Freud).

harnessing of painful emotion and the progression from projection, paranoia, and fear to integration and clear vision.

When we refuse to acknowledge the presence of unwanted feelings, we are as bound to them as when we give ourselves over to them indignantly and self-righteously.

the “good enough mother” who could manage this attack without being destroyed, who could survive the assault without withdrawing in horror, retaliating with fury, or otherwise abdicating her maternal presence.

The other part of the good enough response is to permit the rage, to accept the rupture that it heralds.

realm of instinctual gratification, of the biological drives of hunger and sexuality.

the capacity for thought, speech, and reflection that is lacking in our animal natures.

the pursuit of pleasurable sensory experiences leads inevitably to a state of dissatisfaction, because it is in the nature of pleasure not to be sustainable:

What we call happiness in the strict sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as a periodic phenomenon.

Ignoring the Animal Realm only seems to empower it, as the sexual scandals that have rocked spiritual groups and leaders testify. Sexuality is a threat to spirituality only when it is not integrated. While the Animal Realm cannot be ignored, it can be put in its place. Sexuality certainly does not require the indulgence that is often associated with it, but it does not have to be separated from the enlightened mind.

Tormented by unfulfilled cravings and insatiably demanding of impossible satisfactions, the Hungry Ghosts are searching for gratification for old unfulfilled needs whose time has passed.

Their ghostlike state represents their attachment to the

In addition, these beings, while impossibly hungry and thirsty, cannot drink or eat without causing themselves terrible pain or indigestion.

The Hungry Ghosts must come in contact with the ghostlike nature of their own longings.

She was driven by them but unable to acknowledge their reality, let alone their unreality.

Food and drink will not satisfy the unfulfilled needs of this realm. Only the

This desperate longing for inexhaustible abundance is very common in the Western psyche, where it masquerades under the heading of “low self-esteem.”

The extent of inner feelings of emptiness and unworthiness in the Western psyche has seemed all but unbelievable to teachers raised in the East, and the compelling fantasies of reparation that are often attached to those same teachers are rarely dealt with in any kind of thorough psychoanalytic fashion.

This is the state that has been called confluence in Gestalt therapy: the merger of orgasm, the assimilation of digested food, the attunement of the infant at the breast, the satisfaction of any completed experience in which a new whole is created and the self temporarily dissolves.

Their pleasures are temporary, sounds the lute: they are forgetting the sufferings of others; they are resting on their laurels and will one day fall from grace.

a clinging to what comes to be an unhealthy confluence and a pulling back from, or estrangement from, healthy confluence.

from their children, lovers, friends, parents, co-workers, or other intimates and who refuse to allow the necessary “otherness” that permits those others to breathe.

because of early deprivations or prodding into independence, crave, and yet are made anxious by, the ego dissolution of confluence.

Never having sufficiently experienced the relaxation of the parental embrace in early childhood, they are understandably frightened by the approach of its corollary in adulthood, and they tense, or pull back, at the moment of orgasm, guarding the very ego boundaries that they were induced to create prematurely.

the person’s ability to relax ego boundaries, to dissolve temporarily, to acknowledge the joy of connection and of aesthetic and intellectual pleasures.