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August 22 - September 3, 2025
Buddhist psychology embraces this multilevel perspective. We have seen how consciousness, like light, functions on one level as particles and on another like waves. So too our existence has both a universal and a personal dimension. This psychological paradox is called the Two Truths. Sometimes these two dimensions, two truths, are mistranslated as the “absolute” and the “relative.” This mistranslation makes it appear that the absolute or universal has higher value than the relative or personal, but they are actually two complementary aspects of reality.
Our life has universal and personal nature. Both dimensions must be respected if we are to be happy and free.
Without a big picture, the inevitable changes in life can overwhelm us. But when we lose a job or win a promotion, end a marriage, have a grandchild, get sick or get well, it is not just personal. It is the dance of life. This broad perspective is especially important in the most extreme crises.
If you tell a Zen master everything is like a dream, she will take her stick and whack you over the head. Then she will ask, “Is that a dream?” Focusing on the big picture alone is not enough. Form must be honored. A mature psychology requires us to see life from multiple perspectives.
The problem was that Theresa and Mark were not happy in their choices. Their past wounds and trauma kept them stuck on the universal level, spiritualizing their problems. This is common in spiritual circles. Whether it’s a Buddhist saying that “everything is a dream” or a Christian who believes that “it’s all God’s will,” these truths can be misused to refuse personal responsibility.
“Spiritual experience can actually lead to inflation. There’s no one more insufferable than someone who thinks they’re more enlightened than anybody else, without a certain sense of humor. I know people who on one level are deeply at peace and enlightened, and yet go crazy if they miss a bus. On one level we may still be five years old, and on another level be a saint. That’s what keeps us humble. That’s why religion is very funny.”
When we remember who we really are, we bring together the universal with the personal. Instead of becoming more disembodied or rigidly spiritual, we have a sense of humor about the whole dance of life, and everything becomes easier and lighter.
Mindfulness is attention. It is a non-judging and respectful awareness. Unfortunately, much of the time we don’t attend in this way. Instead, we continually react, judging whether we like, dislike, or can ignore what is happening. We evaluate ourselves and others with a stream of expectations, commentary, and criticism.
Mindful attention to any experience is liberating. Mindfulness brings perspective, balance, and freedom.
In many Western mindfulness retreats, the four principles for mindful transformation are taught with the acronym RAIN: recognition, acceptance, investigation, and non-identification. The Zen poets tell us that “the rain falls equally on all things,” and like the nourishment of outer rain, the inner principles of RAIN can transform our difficulties. THE TRANSFORMATIVE PRINCIPLES 1. Recognition 2. Acceptance 3. Investigation (body, feelings, mind, and dharma) 4. Non-identification
The fourth foundation of mindfulness is the dharma. Dharma is an important and multifaceted word. It can mean the teachings and the path of Buddhism. It can mean the Truth, and in this case it can also mean the elements and patterns that make up experience. Investigating the dharma, we look into the principles and laws that are operating.
Mindfulness of the body allows us to live fully. It brings healing, wisdom, and freedom.
When we struggle with confusion, fear, ambition, depression, or loss, Buddhist psychology asks us to sense how we experience this in our body.
Meditating on the elements is also used to understand death. This is among the most life-changing contemplations. In the West, we resist reflecting on aging and death because dying is held as failure and it frightens us. In the Buddhist approach, we deliberately turn to face death so that it can bring wisdom, perspective, and a motivation to live each day fully and well.
Buddhist psychology helps us distinguish two critical aspects of feeling. The first and most essential quality is called the primary feeling. According to this perspective, every moment of our sense experience has a feeling tone. Like valence in chemistry, each sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, or thought will have either a pleasant, painful, or neutral quality. Modern neuroscience confirms that everything that registers in the brain is assigned some negative or positive valence. The primary feeling tone comes first. Then, born out of this simple feeling tone, there arises a whole array of
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Our painful experience does not represent failure. Meditation masters have sickness and pain like the rest of us.
Wisdom knows what feelings are present without being lost in them.
It’s very helpful to realize that the emotions we have, the negativity and the positivity, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive. —Pema Chödrön
In modern English, the words feeling and emotion are often used synonymously. However, Buddhist psychology distinguishes the primary feelings from the range of emotions that follow them. Each of the three primary feeling tones gives rise to secondary emotions,
Usually we think that feelings and emotions last for a long time. We speak of a morning of anxiety, a day of irritability, a week of infatuation, a month of depression. But as we investigate closely, we discover that most feelings last no longer than fifteen or thirty seconds.
As we learn to track our feelings, our emotional intelligence grows. With mindfulness, a natural intuition and discrimination begin to tell us which feelings call for action and which, if acted upon, will lead to unnecessary suffering.
Who is your enemy? Mind is your enemy. Who is your friend? Mind is your friend. Learn the ways of the mind. Tend the mind with care. —Buddha
Buddhist psychology emphasizes that we must understand the power of the stories we tell, and differentiate them from the direct experience of life. In this way we can use thoughts without being trapped by them. As one of my teachers put it, “Thoughts make a good servant, but a poor master.”
Thoughts are often one-sided and untrue. Learn to be mindful of thought instead of being lost in it.
most of the time we are “lost in thought.” Fortunately, with training, we can become mindful of the patterns of thought that condition our perception. We can cut through the sticky patterns of fear or competition, jealousy, judgment, or ambition. To start, it helps to acknowledge the most repetitious thoughts, the “top ten tunes,” by naming them. They might be repeated thoughts about money, or conflict, or anxious planning. The judging mind is another common tune, representing all the critical, disappointed voices from our childhood. If we fight it—“I shouldn’t be judging. I’m too harsh”—we
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Our thoughts are always more provisional and one-sided than we admit. Ordinarily we believe them. But questioning our thoughts is at the heart of Buddhist practice. Is what we believe real, solid, certain?
Most of our mental suffering comes from how tightly we hold our beliefs. In the monastery Ajahn Chah used to smile and ask, “Is it true?” He wanted us to learn to hold our thoughts lightly. In Buddhist training, our thoughts are deconstructed, the entire structure dismantled plank by plank.
The point of mindfulness is not to get rid of thought but to learn to see thought skillfully. The Buddhist tradition trains the thinking mind and intellect to think clearly and well. We need to plan, think, organize, imagine, and create. Considered thoughts are a great gift. Our thoughts can set a direction, bring us understanding, analyze and discern, and put us in tune with the life around us. When we rest in the heart, then we can use thought wisely, we can plan and imagine in benevolent ways.
The key to wise thought is to sense the energy state behind the thought. If we pay attention, we will notice that certain thoughts are produced by fear and the small sense of self. With them will be clinging, rigidity, unworthiness, defensiveness, aggression, or anxiety. We can sense their effect on the heart and the body. When we notice this suffering we can relax, breathe, loosen the identification. With this awareness the mind will become more open and malleable. With this pause we return to our Buddha nature. Now we can think, imagine, and plan, but from a state of ease and benevolence.
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Consciousness receives and preserves all our sense experience and perceptions. These become storehouse consciousness, unmanifested and unconscious, until the conditions for manifestation again become present. —Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness
Buddhist psychology taught about the unconscious foundation of human behavior. It described this foundation as having two different levels: first, the individual unconscious, and second, the universal unconscious, called storehouse consciousness. Though these levels are not ordinarily available to conscious awareness, they rule our lives. And with mindfulness they can gradually be made conscious and transformed.
Storehouse consciousness is a term used in Buddhist psychology to describe the oceanic dimension of the unconscious where all memory, history, and potential are contained. Storehouse consciousness has both individual and universal dimensions. In the individual dimension, storehouse consciousness holds the patterns, the sankharas, of each person’s past. In the universal dimension, it is a shared reservoir of collective memories, images, and desires. Carl Jung explored some aspects of storehouse consciousness, using the term collective unconscious. More recently, neuroscientist Karl Pribram and
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As meditation deepens, unconscious patterns held in the body and mind can arise. We can become aware of past history, of beliefs and images that were previously unconscious. Then we can find ourselves confronted with powerful feelings of greed, rage, fear, or grief far beyond anything we have ever known or acknowledged. Sometimes they are connected with our personal history, and sometimes they arise as the more universal dimension of storehouse consciousness. When storehouse consciousness opens, we can spontaneously experience what Buddhist psychology calls the many planes of existence. These
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There is a personal and a universal unconscious. Turning awareness to the unconscious brings understanding and freedom.
From the start, Buddhist psychology, like many ancient traditions, has recognized the symbolic and predictive value of dreams and the way dreams can reflect our desires, conflicts, and drives.
But Buddhist psychology goes further, through the practices of dream yoga. These practices teach us not only to remember our dreams but also to be aware while we are dreaming. In dream yoga we can even direct our dreams to some extent, deliberately exploring the dimensions of consciousness that dreams represent. This ability, called lucid dreaming, was for a long time dismissed by Western science.
In Buddhist training, lucid dreaming is systematically developed through concentration and repeated intention over many days. But even without deliberate training, lucid dreaming can arise spontaneously on extended retreats.
dream content, so richly valued in the West, is seen as secondary in Buddhist practice. It is finding equanimity within the play of consciousness, an unshakable ease with every state of sleeping and waking, that is the purpose of meditation.
The three unhealthy roots—grasping, aversion, and delusion—must be clearly understood and transformed. This is a difficult process, as we will see in the chapters ahead. These three roots are the primary unconscious drives, which generate all the difficult mental states.
When people first begin to be mindful of their personality they are frequently dissatisfied by what they find: they often want to become like someone else. In Buddhist communities, students may try to overcome their dissatisfaction by unconsciously imitating the manner and personality of their teacher. I have seen the followers of one famous lama eat the same kinds of noodles, make the same hand gestures, and speak with a Tibetan accent.
The unhealthy patterns of our personality can be recognized and transformed into a healthy expression of our natural temperament.
The grasping or greed temperament is constructed around desire. It is experienced as a sense of seeking, of wanting more, and of addiction. It grasps after comfort and avoids disharmony in all situations. It desires fulfillment through pleasures, finding what it likes in the world of the senses. From liking, it can move quickly to craving, passion, and sensuality. Out of the roots of grasping there arise associated states of vanity, willfulness, pride, self-centeredness, jealousy, avarice, deceit, and addiction. The grasping temperament is associated with an even balance of the elements of
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The aversive temperament is constructed around judgment and rejection of experience. It has a disaffected quality that easily sees faults, and for this temperament, problems are apparent everywhere. It is critical, quickly displeased, quarrelsome, and disparaging of many things. Its quality of aversion can give rise to states of anger, vindictiveness, haughtiness, hatred, cruelty, aggression, and the struggle to control. There is a tight-fisted and rigid quality to this temperament. It is associated with the elements of fire and wind.
Hatred
The deluded or confused temperament is constructed around uncertainty and confusion. People with this temperament experience not quite knowing what to do or how to relate to the world. They seek to establish ease by ignoring what is happening or through dullness or inaction. The deluded temperament gives rise to perplexity and worry, doubt, negligence, scattered thoughts, anxiety, and agitation. The deluded type can also seem easily intoxicated. It is associated with the heaviness of earth and the movement of water.
In the forest monastery, I quickly discovered that I am a classic greed type. Give me a run-down hovel or a forest hut and I will sweep it clean and look for a flower to put in the window. Some say the greed temperament is the easiest to work with. But in my experience, greed prevents me from seeing the world as clearly as the aversive types, and I get much more attached than deluded types. Without mindfulness, I am always looking for what I want, or for ways to make things better. There is an addictive quality to my relationship to food, contact, sensuality. And a deeper unfulfilled
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Once we recognize the patterns of personality, we can see them for what they are: simply different patterns of energy.
The grasping temperament, when transformed, gives rise to beauty and abundance. Just as Somchai built an exquisite meditation hall for Ajahn Jumnian, we take whatever situation we find ourselves in and bring beauty to it. We highlight the goodness and generosity of the people around us and we make our home and community places of harmony.
The aversive temperament, when transformed, gives rise to discriminating wisdom, non-contentiousness, and loving-kindness. Anger can be transformed into strength and clarity that unite the opposites.
When transformed, the deluded temperament gives rise to spaciousness, equanimity, and understanding, called the wisdom of great questioning.
Most people fail to see reality because of wanting. They are attached; they cling to material objects, to pleasures, to the things of this world. This very clinging is the source of suffering. —Majjhima Nikaya
