Laurel Carrington

The Three Characteristics: No-Self

Anatta or no-self (sometimes translated as not-self) is the hardest of the Three Characteristics to understand. We can all agree that the things of this world are impermanent, or that there is suffering, but to grasp that you are not you, that “you” as a separate, continuous self do not exist, hits the roadblock of a lifetime of experience. How can I not exist? If I don’t exist, then who or what is writing and reading these words? Whose life is it that I remember, whose future do I imagine? Close on the heels of disbelief is fear of what it would mean for anatta to be true. I might be able to give up a lot of things, but not my precious self!

The Buddha teaches that what we call atta or self (atman in Sanskrit) is really just the coming together of five aggregates, or bundles: form, sensation, perception, mental formation (or fabrication), and consciousness. When I first encountered this teaching, I initially felt a sense of relief that the Buddha left us with at least something to hold onto. The trouble is, holding onto any of these bundles (khandas or skandhas) leads to ignorance, delusion, and suffering. For example, identifying with the body (form) leaves us with the unfortunate delusion that we can control it, which we do by trying to be as beautiful, healthy, or strong as possible, preferably more so than other people. People suffer from eating disorders when they desire a slender body and have a powerful aversion to fat. In the meantime, the aging process goes on its merry way in spite of our most strenuous efforts at stopping it. Illness strikes, and while medical help is available, some diseases can’t be cured.

Sensations are even less to be identified with the self. We may enjoy pleasurable sensations, but we can’t make them last, nor can we eliminate unpleasant ones. Our thoughts may seem at first to be a more likely candidate, but a few moments quietly observing them should be enough to convince us otherwise. Thoughts arise unbidden and with little coherence, if any. Still, out of the chaos of free association there will be a few thought sequences that can take hold and proliferate, turning into definitions, beliefs, and even entire ideologies. It is easy to grab onto them and find security, even if they are negative thoughts (“I’m ugly,” “I’ll never understand math”). Many of these thoughts are formed in defense against further pain, because if I can be the first to claim I’m ugly or stupid, I’m not going to be vulnerable to another person making those judgments.

What is the field of consciousness that seems to hold all these things together? Nothing more than memories, associations, and projections, which are anything but stable. Our past is gone, and the person we thought we were is gone with it. Yet the belief that each person is a self persists, and in certain respects it serves a purpose. The suffering of my first marriage resulted in part from my underdeveloped sense of self, which made it possible for me to latch on to someone who appeared to have a strong sense of self. Telling a person in that situation that the self is an illusion is utterly useless. It might be more helpful to say that the rage and insults of the partner are not personal, but that kind of statement is an invitation to spiritual bypassing.

Bypassing is a hazard in the spiritual life, regardless of one’s path. St. Augustine originally thought that his faith in God should have made him immune to grief upon the death of his mother, but it wasn’t until he broke down in tears that he began to heal. In the Buddhist path, thinking that “you” don’t really exist or that your own actions and those of others are simply forces of nature, the product of causes and conditions, can function as a form of denial. We have to confront the truth of our own experience, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Believing or even rationally understanding this teaching is not the point; one must experience it directly. There are practices that work to bring about such an experience. One is to ask oneself where the self can be found. Is it in the eyes? Is it in anything the eyes can see? Is there a little man behind the eyeballs looking out on the world? Is it perhaps the brain? Ah, we may be getting somewhere here. Let’s look at the brain and see what’s there. Is the brain afraid of embarrassment? If so, on behalf of what, itself or something else? What is afraid? We know there are parts of the brain that govern various functions. This being the case, then, are there parts of the brain that are the self, the prefrontal cortex, perhaps? If so, why doesn’t it succeed in dislodging unnecessary, paralyzing fear?

Such questions can be pursued with a teacher over a period of hours or even days, until direct insight hits. Other people have arrived at insight by detailed, extensive journaling, writing to discern what they know to be true, or what they know to be true of themselves. For some people, this practice is supported by years of meditation, while for others it is not. Finally, insight meditation practices—noting, body scanning, and the like, supported by concentration practice—can lead to a dismantling of the illusion of self.

The experience of a world unidentified with self is deeply liberating, but it can also be uncanny. We are dug in so deeply with the illusion that we have no idea how anything might appear without it. Life goes on, just as before, nothing changed, yet nothing the same. And absolutely nothing is personal.

Starter Marriage

NOTE: I have not posted in awhile, because I have had some reluctance about putting this out there. Here it is, finally.

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I was not prepared for the sexual revolution. According to my upbringing, sex before marriage was forbidden, and anyone indulging in it was ruined, particularly women. My parents were clear that they had refrained from sexual activity until they were married, and then remained faithful to each other thereafter. I was also brainwashed by the mythology of romantic love, believing that falling in love rendered a person immune to interest in anyone other than the beloved. I had little to no concept of my own sexuality, much less anyone else’s.

My first year at an all-women’s college was traumatic. Early in the fall we met potential dates at mass dances called mixers, where people judged one another solely on appearance, or at parties fueled by alcohol. The women all wanted to enhance their status by landing dates with attractive, high-status men, while a large majority of the men were looking mostly for sex. My fragile ego could not have handled casual sex, yet most of the men I dated pursued it aggressively. Coming from a family that was bonded to the point of suffocation, I looked for a place of safety.

I first discovered that my social anxiety could be curbed by alcohol, and so I drank when at parties or on dates. This wasn’t exactly safe, but it was at least temporarily pleasant. I wanted a more permanent solution, a boyfriend, but finding a compatible mate wasn’t easy in an environment where I met the opposite sex under such artificial conditions. I joined the orchestra and the debate club at a nearby university, but over and over found myself back at square one when potential relationships fizzled. Finally, one evening in the spring of my sophomore year, I was with someone I’d been seeing for awhile at a chamber music performance at his dorm. We were circulating afterward, and I found myself looking up into the eyes of a very tall, very broad-shouldered young man who looked at me as if he had suddenly seen the promised land.

I was at that time feeling desperately depressed. My relationship with my date was completely superficial, although we made a beautiful couple when we went out together. He also happened to be the person who was in the right place at the right time when I finally gave in to the relentless sexual pressure of the preceding two years. The experience was disappointing, of course, and by the time of the concert we were both sick of each other, although I would be the one who ended up getting dumped. I felt like a used tissue tossed into the trash. And then all of a sudden I was at the center of attention to a powerful, handsome man who wanted nothing more than to scoop me up into his arms and hold me there forever.

Did I love him? Eventually, I suppose. After feeling so devalued I certainly loved the fact that he adored me. I also was attracted to what I perceived as his strength. I had an underdeveloped sense of myself, who I was or what I wanted. He, on the other hand, had strong ideas about everything. This appealed to me because I wanted to know his secret. Most of all, he wanted me. “I want to take you away from your previous owners,” he said at one point, referring to my parents, whom he antagonized almost immediately.

The violence started early, but it didn’t register as dangerous. He would throw something against the wall, or grab something with enough force to break it. The things that set him off were confusing to me, but because I was so unsure of what was real and what was not I accepted his touchiness as legitimate. He had a strong sense of what he was entitled to and flew into a rage when thwarted. I tried to see things from his point of view, although occasionally I would venture to argue, which only made things worse. It didn’t help that some of his opinions seemed legitimate (for example, my parents were overprotective and controlling), but the lengths to which he would go to assert himself threw him into continuous conflict with other people, including me.

We were married while we were still in college. My parents tried to prevent me from going through with it, but they were helpless in the face of such a forceful opponent, especially as I had come to regard their interference with hostility. Our marriage lasted for a little over three years. In that time we moved out of our respective dorm rooms into an apartment, and then into two others, the last one halfway across the country. Every time we moved he would have to make extensive repairs to avoid paying damages, mostly to holes he’d punched in the wall. Every time we moved I would scope out the new building for places of escape and safety in case things got out of control.

Did I think this was normal? I knew I didn’t like it, but I also thought I bore at least part of the blame when things went wrong. I certainly wasn’t mature, even for my age: I was anxious, insecure, jealous, and plagued with irrational expectations. What I failed to realize was that none of these faults warranted being grabbed by the hair and dragged around the room, threatened with severe bodily harm (“Get out of here before I break your jaw!” he roared at me once), screamed at (in the car, when turning left: “Get your fucking head out of the window!”), or threatened with a gun. And yet all through everything I thought I was free, that I was making decisions and standing up for myself, not seeing that the only things I was free to decide were things he didn’t care about.

Over time the range of things he didn’t care about grew narrower and narrower; he smashed his immense fist into the coffee table when I put on a shade of nail polish he didn’t like, and bellowed at me when I bought a dress he hated (“It looks like a goddam bag!”). Finally I left, flew home to the parents I had rejected when I married, and felt grateful beyond words for their protection.

For awhile the ensuing divorce was the most important thing in my life, until other concerns began to take over. For a bit longer I was haunted by fear and anger, which took extra time to work themselves out of my system; however the hardest thing to overcome was a sense of disorientation: how could I have been so completely wrong about what was happening? It was as if my entire perspective had flipped over in a moment. I could not trust my own ability to make sense of the world. This fundamental distrust would remain with me for many, many years.

Tears

For years, I kept my daily life separate from my relationship with Mark and Tommy, even to the point of denying they were a problem for me. In my first experiences with therapy, I mentioned them as a matter of course while giving the family history, but insisted that my real problems lay elsewhere. In the meantime, however, there was a subterranean river of grief that would break through to the surface occasionally, surprising me for a spell before disappearing again. The water metaphor is an apt one, because when I finally accessed the grief, I did so through tears that seemed to have no end.

I remember clearly a scene at Tanglewood during my first summer there. I was just 18 and was between my first and second years of college. I had had a difficult time managing and masking my stage fright, but on one night in particular it broke through during a concert of the Fellowship Orchestra, when I felt so panicked that I abruptly rose from my seat among the violins and walked off the stage in the middle of the performance. Backstage I almost literally ran into a trombonist who had unsuccessfully tried to romance me earlier in the summer. We walked around the grounds while I poured out my anguish in a flood of shame and frustration, until my parents found me and my father took over. He told me that he and my mother had watched me struggling with this torment for years, and he urged me to give up.

Now in the American vocabulary, quitting is commensurate with failure, made all the more blameworthy when it is chosen. What’s more, being advised to quit meant that I would never know whether I might have succeeded in conquering my fear if I had persevered. So I struggled with the notion as we walked, the fork in the road between the easy way out and the valiant fight to the end. And then my parents drove me home, and I somehow was moved to dig out the family photo album, pictures of me and my brothers as we were growing up, and I cried over them for what seemed like hours, grieving for all that I had lost.

That night marked the beginning of my tears. For years thereafter I would cry over my brothers almost any time I was left alone. If I was on a bus, I would turn my face to the window and cry. If I was alone in my room, I would pace the floor and cry. I cried in therapy, I cried in bed at night, I cried wherever and whenever I was alone. There were thoughts that were guaranteed to trigger the tears, like the thought of how sad it was and how much I missed them. Sometimes I would dwell on a fantasy of my brother Tommy’s death, imagining a phone call, usually while I was in a large group of people. In my fantasy I would break down completely, finally relieved of the heavy burden of maintaining an appearance of functionality.

At some point I began to suspect that the grief was for myself and had little to do with the people my brothers actually were, but I could not make sense of that distinction until my mother told me that when she first learned of the diagnosis, particularly of the younger of the two, she grieved for herself, then grieved for them, and then finally grieved for me. As the sister my grief may have come third in line, but it still had a place, and so I continued to grieve for myself.

Along with the grief there were painful fantasies of what might have been. I would look at young men who seemed to be my brothers’ age and wonder what my life might have been like if these “normal” people had been my brothers instead of the ones I had. I imagined Another Laurel, the one who grew up in a normal middle-class American family, the family that was taken away from me. What would she be like? I understood enough to know that it was impossible to tell, but the question needled me nonetheless. The family I actually had appeared to live out its life under a cloud of sadness and isolation. What would it be like to live differently? Would I be like these carefree young people I saw around me? (although of course I had no real concept of what their lives were really like either).

There came a day when I was listening to an interview on the radio, about the complex emotions of parents of autistic children. I suddenly thought, “I’m done with that.” I wasn’t done with grief, but I was done with thinking things either could or should have been other than what they were. I may have been painfully slow about it, but I had finally passed through the earlier stages of grief into a grudging acceptance.

The Three Characteristics: Suffering

Dukkha, “suffering” (also translated as “unsatisfactoriness”), is central to the Buddha’s teaching; in fact, he reputedly said, “I teach only suffering, and the end of suffering.” We’ve already encountered the role of suffering in the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha also appears as one of the three marks or characteristics of existence, permeating our lives and our surroundings through and through. There are things that please us, beguile us, hook us in; but none of these things satisfies.

When we’re young, we are full of plans for what we want to do with our lives. For most of us, these plans might include things like a career, marriage, children, a nice place to live, money to spend on necessities and a few luxuries, travel, hobbies, good food, nice clothes, and friends. Young people are encouraged by their families and teachers to look to the future and to consider their immediate difficulties to be transitory. I recall a conversation with my mother and one of her friends, during a time in my life when I didn’t fit in. “Some day,” they told me, “none of this will matter.” They were wrong: as I became an adult, the identity I formed in adolescence proved to be remarkably tenacious.

Enter the Buddha and his teachings regarding dukkha. One of my dharma teachers, Kenneth Folk, has said that “the Buddha is not your friend.” Warm, rosy predictions of a brilliant life in samsara, the turning wheel of birth and death, are entirely unfounded. Some adults in our own culture might agree with him once we hit our midlife crisis, when we realize that our fond hopes in youth have not materialized; or maybe they have, but without bringing the happiness we had expected. People may be tempted to jump ship, make a career change or look for a new partner, or buy a new house or car they can’t really afford. It might work out in the short run, but letdown is inevitable.

From time to time I imagine my life as if it had been different in some significant way. Maybe I never had the stage fright, and would be able to perform in music ensembles without stress. Maybe I had the kind of systematic focus that would allow me to work an eight-hour day, go home and relax, engage in an enjoyable hobby, and then go to sleep without difficulty. Maybe I wasn’t plagued by the grandiose illusion that I needed a big, fat career, and so would never be constantly comparing myself to others, or feeling like a failure just doing a good job day in and day out. In other words, I imagine a life without dukkha.

This Other Laurel is still a meditator, I’ve decided. She gets up early, makes herself a cup of tea, maybe takes a brisk walk around the block, and then settles down for some cushion time. After work she heads to the meditation center for a half hour sit with a group before heading home. She also volunteers in her community (because of course, she has the energy for it). She lives simply but comfortably; she is not tempted to spend more than she earns. Is she married? Sometimes I imagine her as single, but it seems like a lonely life to me, so I give her my husband, except he’s the Other Husband, also free of dukkha.

I have found a place for this paragon to live, and have even imagined her car and her wardrobe. The entire fantasy seems to be an equivalent of the dreams I had as a young person, except instead of dreaming of my imaginary future, I dream of an imaginary past. But although I can see the outer trappings of this person’s life, I am unable to make sense of what lies within. I can only try to imagine the absence of things like stress, depression, boredom, regret, negative judgments, and anxiety, all the while knowing that it is impossible.

Traveling allows us to see other places, and imagine what life might be like for us if we lived there. We read novels or watch movies and television shows in order to put ourselves in the place of the protagonist. Maybe we fall in love with one of the characters—the protagonist’s love interest, most likely—or imagine ourselves working in that person’s occupation. Such experiences help us to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a human in the world, to place ourselves in another person’s skin or context, which is an essential component of a moral education. Still, they can never be more than the product of our imaginings.

I have recently longed to move somewhere else, either to the city that is an hour’s drive from here or to a warmer climate, or maybe even out of the country altogether. These longings are accompanied by imaginings of Other Laurels living in Other Places with the Other Husband. Yet several years ago I looked out the kitchen window at the trees in my neighbor’s yard, and just realized, “This is it!” I laughed. It was so simple that I might not even have noticed. This is it, just this. This is all that is it. No other, no else. Just this.

The Big Wow

I think it was in a post by Brad Warner that I first heard about The Big Wow, or perhaps it was just on one of the Internet forums I frequent. The Big Wow is the overwhelming, transforming, hit-by-a-bolt-of-lightning mystical experience that changes you forever after. Everyone wants one of those, and once you get it, you spend a good part of the rest of your life wanting another, and another, and another. Yet it’s not the Big Wow that actually transforms you; it’s the plodding, day-to-day grind of sitting in meditation, doing walking meditation, practicing mindfulness during the day, questioning yourself, and getting your act together on a number of fronts (which is what the Noble Eightfold Path is all about). You may be able to draw on the memory of that experience to motivate yourself to keep plugging away, but in the long run it’s a mistake to make too much of it.

My Big Wow happened when I was 19. It was March of 1973, and I was returning to college from spring break. For some reason, my violin teacher had loaned me her car for the week, a reflection of how close we were during that period. I was traveling east on the Massachusetts turnpike, going a little over 70. There was a school bus in front of me, and we were approaching a slight hill. I got in the left lane to pass the bus, accelerated to about 80, and then without warning the school bus pulled in front of me (I can still see it in my mind’s eye). Being a young, inexperienced driver, I did the opposite of what I should have done: I slammed on the brakes, putting the car into a tailspin. I overcorrected with the steering, tried the brakes again, and then began to panic as I lost all control of the car.

What happened next is hard to describe. I remember skidding back and forth over the highway with a few other cars in view, and I remember a look of concern on someone’s face through a window of one of those cars. I recognized with a sickening horror that I might not be able to get out of it alive, when suddenly I surrendered and everything stopped. I felt myself gently pulled upward, out of my body, and I felt the various parts of my identity fall away as if I were dropping layers of clothing. I had a thought: so now this one is over, the one called Laurel, tall, blonde, a violinist—and so it ends, and now I’m returning. And then I was flooded by an indescribable love, and thought briefly with regret about my parents, how they would grieve. But consolation was immediate: soon they will know, in no time at all. And there was relaxation into that love which was my true home.

The next thing I recall was returning to myself in a daze, with the car on the left shoulder, facing in the opposite direction of the road. I had no idea how I got there. I eventually made my way to the right shoulder, where I was approached by a kind man who had stopped to help me. I slowly followed him and his family to the nearest rest stop, and had a cup of chicken soup and some tea. “See,” he told his young daughter, “Laurel went through all that and now she’s sitting right here.” We parted and I drove the rest of the way into Boston.

It would have been lovely if, in the aftermath of that experience, I could have integrated its insights and lived my life forever free from the fear of death. Instead, I was left with another phobia about driving on highways, which has stayed with me to this day. It would also have been lovely if I had gained the kind of perspective that would have led to better mental health, or at least more maturity. No such luck. I did spend time and energy puzzling over it, in an attempt to put it in some kind of framework that would make it intelligible. At the time I was under the influence of my Christian Scientist music teacher, who urged me to put it out of my mind and not speak of it. Traffic accidents fall in the same category as illness, something that involves the unreal material world, which according to that doctrine we must transcend.

Later, when I became serious about Christianity, I viewed my experience as an encounter with the pure love of God. I read mystic writers with a sense of having something of my own to bring to the table, feeling a little smug about it, to be honest. I had fallen into the trap of seeing myself as special, an inevitable pitfall of the spiritual life. Later still, as a Buddhist, I saw it as one of the stages on the Path of Insight. In some respects it fits the profile of both traditions. I have come to prefer calling it The Big Wow, however, because that term is just irreverent enough to keep it in perspective. Such things can happen, and then other stuff happens, and it’s best not to wallow in it. The most such an experience can do is inspire you to keep practicing when you might otherwise skip it. It is ancillary, not central. That is all.

Stage Fright

I began my musical training at an early age, first on the piano and then on the violin. For five or six years I studied violin with a teacher at a local community music school, where I made a lot of friends and participated in performing ensembles. I also took part in recitals, my first taste of performing solo in front of an audience. I didn’t like it at all. Nonetheless, the stakes were relatively low, and I had what might be described as a normal case of nerves.

That all changed when I began studying the violin more intensively with a formidable new teacher during my junior year. He was charismatic, demanding, and by turns seductive and scathingly critical. In two years I made my way through a sizable chunk of the major solo repertoire, developing my technique far beyond anything I had achieved before. I also spent three summers at music camps, where I was thrown in with highly trained, sophisticated people, many of them New Yorkers. By the time I was out of high school at 17 I had a full-blown phobia. My most obvious symptom was a shaking bow arm, which would happen even when I wasn’t experiencing the emotions of panic. I came up with ways to circumvent the problem, but the result was that I found it impossible to concentrate on the music itself. Sometimes the shakiness would intensify, while at other times it would subside. It didn’t always hit, and not always under predictable circumstances; for example, I was okay in a group or in a rehearsal of a solo, at least for awhile.

My teacher wanted me to go to Juilliard, or failing that, a college with a world-class music program. I ended up instead at a prestigious liberal arts college with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Actually, the problem was that I had too many ideas, and one of them was still music. I spent the two summers following my freshman and sophomore years in the Fellowship Program at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I began studying with a violinist from the Boston Symphony, who happened to be a Christian Scientist. She was about 10 years older than I was, tall and blonde (like me!) and we became close. I attended the Mother Church in Boston with her a few times, stayed at her apartment on occasional weekends, and identified with her completely, expecting to follow her path.

The only fly in the ointment was the damned stage fright. Christian Science teaches that even physical illness is a manifestation of a disordered view, a lack of faith and trust. In the case of a phobia, the sufferer is all the more under the spell of misguided thinking, which needs to be corrected through a combination of contact with the truth and prayer. It is best, in fact, not even to allow thoughts of fear to arise, if at all possible, because thinking about it, worrying about it, gives it power. Unfortunately for me, however, I thought about it all the time. I went into therapy with a classic Freudian analyst and talked about anxiety, my family, sex, self-image, and Lord knows what else, to no avail whatsoever (although it was lovely having someone pay so much attention to me). Forty-five years later, after numerous interventions (CBT, EMDR, Beta blockers, whatever) I can’t really say what the source of my phobia was, much less how to get rid of it. I have lectured in front of hundreds of people, sung solos in church and at a diocesan convention, and yet to this day if you stood me up in front of a small kindergarten class and asked me to pull a bow across a string, my right arm would shake.

Under the circumstances, Tanglewood was a protracted nightmare. The stakes were higher than ever, and my fear became paralyzing. By the second summer I was taking Valium for my nerves. I was also enrolled in a conservatory for the following year. Now the paralysis would set in even while playing in an orchestra with a large section. I soldiered on, unwilling to believe that I couldn’t get past the problem. It didn’t help matters that I could play very well, that I was actually accomplished enough to realistically imagine a career for myself. I loved music passionately, and felt overwhelming fulfillment in being able to bring it to life under the power of my own body. I just couldn’t share it with anyone. The grief and frustration I felt were indescribable. It’s only in the past couple of years that someone—a therapist, actually—labeled my experience as “incomplete loss,” the same terminology I had encountered elsewhere to describe the feelings of family members of people with mental illness, people like my brothers.

I left the conservatory after one year and returned to my liberal arts college, where I majored in intellectual history. By then I was married and no longer playing the violin. I would later participate in sight-reading chamber music in graduate school, but eventually I would stop playing altogether for about twenty years. At the time, it was the only decision that made sense.

The Three Characteristics: Impermanence

The Buddha taught that all of our experiences have three basic characteristics, the first of which is anicca, or impermanence, the second dukkha, suffering, and the third anatta, not-self (also translated as no-self). We are most familiar with impermanence from the changes that occur over the days and years, with children being born, growing up, and leaving home, or our bodies showing signs of aging. We may resist these changes, grieving the loss of our children or of our youthful appearance, or we may welcome them, but either way, nothing stays the same forever. Moving to another house, town, or country; changing jobs or careers; losing loved ones to accidents, illness, or old age—all present challenges to our sense of security and self.

My father worked for a single bank in our hometown for two decades before retirement, then left it all behind and moved with my mother to the other end of the state. Soon after his retirement, the bank was consolidated with several others in the region, and most of my father’s contribution became a thing of the past. The new president was the manager of the conglomerate, with the bank my father had managed only a relatively minor part of the new entity. As he and my mother began a new life elsewhere, the network of friends and neighbors they left behind thinned out. In his prime, my father had been a major figure in that community. In no time at all, he was barely remembered. I watched this happening during my own prime working years, when I was leaving my mark on the world, or so I thought. It was a soboring lesson in impermanence.

There is another, more refined level of impermanence which most of us never see, that being the instant-by-instant rhythm of life itself. We order our lives temporally as past-present-future, remembering the first, experiencing the second, and imagining the third. In truth, however, each of these is a construction of our minds, and the present, in which we believe we live, is gone as soon as it arrives. In a famous commentary on the Buddhist scriptures, the 5th-century teacher Buddhaghosa describes a series of stages meditators will traverse as they practice insight meditation. The fourth of these, Insight into the Arising and Passing Away, is the point at which we will have direct experience of the instantaneous arising and passing of sensations from our minds. The experience itself can be rapturous, with the rapidly passing sensations overloading our senses’ ability to recognize them. Soon after the meditator enters into a new series of stages that are known as the dukkha nyanas, which some call the Dark Night. Their very names are indicative of what they are like: Dissolution, Terror, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance, and worst of all, Reobservation, in which the meditator goes back over the series again and again until they have absorbed all of its lessons.

Insight meditation, also referred to as mindfulness, is the means by which we learn to observe our minds and bodies more and more closely, until the Three Characteristics become clear to us in all of our sensations. There are numerous techniques for doing this, not to mention differences of opinion about the appropriate level of preparation for insight practices. Some teachers endorse a gradual approach, with significant work to quiet the mind prior to undertaking insight, while others recommend beginning insight work much sooner and pressing onwards. In addition, not all Buddhists recognize the Progress of Insight map as represented in the commentary, or even if they do, there are some teachers who believe it is not helpful to share information about the different stages with students. There are several reasons for taking this stance, chief among them the concern that our impressionable minds could easily lead us to imagine ourselves at one or another of the stages when we are in fact nowhere near.

Observing the mind at close range is inseparable from observing the body. Many westerners have only a vague idea of what is present in the body because we spend so much of our lives in our heads, preoccupied with our thoughts. In practicing mindfulness of the body, meditators learn to recognize and describe the physical manifestations of our emotions, especially those we tend to ignore or repress in day-to-day life. As a result, insight practices can be hard on the meditator because they bring painful emotions to the surface. I can remember one retreat where my mind-chatter was much worse than usual. I had taken on a practice of choiceless awareness, which involves letting thoughts and sensations pass in and out of awareness without interference, but in the process I was flooded by so many thoughts that I might as well have been daydreaming. I finally turned to a more structured approach called noting, which entails attaching a brief label to sensations as they are recognized. I was immediately plunged into the most excruciating feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and grief, so intense that I could hardly figure out how to work with them. I recognized that my mind had been using the chatter to prevent these feelings from arising, but then my noting technique had dislodged the thoughts. The work of this particular retreat was to allow these emotions to arise and then pass, as all things eventually do, by virtue of their impermanence.

Adolescent Angst

I was a happy, sunshiny kid, but at a certain point that all changed, and I became a withdrawn and anxious adolescent. Maybe it was because I moved across town to a different school in 8th grade, or maybe it was that being young for my grade level finally caught up with me. Besides being younger than my peers, I was a late bloomer, which meant that I still looked like a little girl while the people around me were in the process of developing adult bodies. I also was smart in school. For all these reasons I was bullied for the better part of two years. I remember one day finding myself alone in a classroom with one of my tormentors, who politely asked me a simple question about an assignment. I was so baffled to find her treating me like a human being that I could hardly think of anything to say in reply.

My tendency towards aversion most likely developed at this time. I had interests that put me at odds with most of my classmates, particularly classical music. I saw my first opera at 8 and was enraptured by it. My parents had a tendency to take me everywhere, to symphony, ballet, art museums, the opera, and the theater, and to talk about literature and philosophy at home. On Saturdays the Metropolitan Opera broadcast blasted through the house. I played piano and violin, emphatically uncool in the sixties. When my friends asked me what I got for Christmas, I shuffled my feet and mumbled something about a recording of Paganini’s first violin concerto. They looked at me funny and dropped the subject.

It’s not that I didn’t like the popular music of the sixties, but given a choice, I would always go for the music I loved over the music I liked. I had a few friends who shared my interests, and we clung to one another for dear life, developing a worldview of us vs. them. And then there was the awful family secret. I remember an occasion in 6th grade when my teacher tried to tease information out of me (how the conversation got started I have no idea), showing skepticism at my faltering responses. By the time I was looking at colleges, my violin teacher strongly recommended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I couldn’t tell him that I could never go there because my brother was in the State Hospital in that town. Finally, my mother called him and told him the source of my reticence. It was embarrassing and disturbing at the same time. Here I was, preparing for what everyone said was a brilliant future, and here my two siblings were, sequestered away in places of darkness and shame.

I never told anyone, not my best friend—the girl I shared sleepovers with, in whom I confided my crushes, my feelings about my parents, almost everything—nor any of my friends; I never spoke about it with the boyfriend I passionately loved, nor any other boy, until my senior year in high school. I remember telling my friend Carl because he had a brother who was also in a state hospital, but I don’t remember how we sussed each other out on our common experience. Another male friend, Philip, the least tactful of my friends, prodded and poked at me enough that I eventually talked to him about it. I felt guilty and violated. And then one evening when I was babysitting, the friend keeping me company began to hem and haw to the effect that she had been told by our mutual friends that there was something she should never ask me. What was that, I wanted to know, thinking it probably had to do with our usual topic of conversation of who liked who. She hemmed and hawed some more, claiming that she would never, ever tell me, until finally she blurted it out: “They said I should never ask you about your brothers!” Dead silence. Years later the very thought of it would reduce me to tears, because on that evening so long ago, for the first time, I felt understood.

It was my mother who most strenuously demanded the code of silence. My friend Philip criticized her for it, but she had her reasons, and I accepted them. The dominant theories among psychiatrists at midcentury held that just about everything going on with a child could be attributed to attitudes and actions of the mother; even a hint of maternal reticence could trigger severe mental illness. Fortunately, early on she had a doctor who didn’t think that way, and who told her she’d done absolutely nothing to cause my brothers’ affliction. “What about my daughter?” She asked; “how will this affect her?” “Oh, she’ll be a little neurotic, just like the rest of us” was his reply. Then there was the refusal to subject our private tragedy to other people’s idle curiosity. I discovered later, when I decided to talk about it, that answering one question after another made me feel worse than if I’d remained silent.

Going to college was an opportunity to start out fresh, but I soon realized that I was still the same person with the same backstory and the same hangups. As a freshman at a women’s college, I began college life with a series of mixers and parties to introduce our class to the men at nearby schools. People were forced to make snap decisions about one another based on appearance and not much else. The dates that resulted from these encounters were difficult and stilted. I discovered that alcohol went a long way towards easing my shyness, but drinking led to further complications in the long run. Among other things, I ended up with a string of “boyfriends” who were fun to be with as long as we were both pleasantly drunk, but otherwise of no real interest. I also had to contend with the exhausting task of setting limits and sticking to them.

After struggling in this way for a couple of years, I found someone and became attached, or rather, dependent on him. Our brief marriage ended soon after we left college and tried to build a life together. I found myself at the age of 24 back in my parents’ home, going through a divorce and feeling like a failure.

The Four Noble Truths

There is a word in the Buddha’s language (Pali, a cousin of Sanskrit) that is usually translated as “suffering.” That word is dukkha. In order to understand its meaning better, we might consider its opposite and counterpart, sukkha. Sukka sounds something like the word “sugar,” to which it is related. We can imagine an experience of sweetness, of bliss, of pleasantness, and then turn to the opposite of these things to recognize dukkha as bitterness, bad feelings, or unpleasantness. The first of the Four Noble Truths asserts that there is a component of dukkha in all human experience. This is as true for the healthy, beautiful, privileged, rich, and famous as it is for those whose lives are full of obvious misery.

Imagine your most delectable experience, maybe sex with the partner of your dreams, or eating a slice of chocolate cake, or feeling a pleasant breeze on a summer day at the beach. No matter how delightful, these experiences don’t last forever, and when they are over, we are on to something else. “Yes,” you may say, “but it was wonderful while it lasted.” It was indeed. Yet if you look closely at each pleasurable experience, you may find that it wasn’t entirely wonderful. Perhaps a touch of performance anxiety accompanied the sex, or maybe there was a sense of frustration that the chocolate cake was gone so soon, or there was an annoying sound of nearby construction marring the beach scene. Maybe after the fact the partner showed too much attention to someone else, prompting jealousy, or the chocolate cake ended up causing a stab of concern about gaining weight, or the return to office work after the trip to the beach was all the more frustrating in comparison with what you were leaving behind.

I am not trying to accentuate the negative here so much as to unpack what the Buddha asserted as a simple fact: that suffering is universal. All of us are subject to sickness, old age, and death, and all of us, most of the time, want things to be other than they are. One thing we do in response is to try to pack our lives with as many pleasant, rewarding experiences as possible. When our efforts are unsuccessful, we tune out the things we don’t like and distract ourselves, finding ways of not being completely present. If we undergo too much trauma we may find ourselves unable to feel much at all, good or bad, or we may find ourselves acting out in a variety of ways.

The Buddha further taught that the root of universal dukkha is tanha, translated as “craving.” This is the Second Noble Truth. We crave not only this or that self-gratifying thing, but existence itself (we can even crave non-existence at times). Craving is part of a sequence called Dependent Origination, a highly complex process through which we become who and what we perceive ourselves to be. This is a convoluted sentence for the sake of expressing a difficult concept, that we are the orchestrators of our own identities. The most debilitating suffering, underlying any other, is the effort we make to hold ourselves together, because in truth there is nothing to hold onto. Craving and its next stage, clinging, mark our overwhelming need to be someone and something, literally to make something of ourselves.

The fruit of these efforts shows up in suffering. Returning to our examples, at the same time we are enjoying a sexual experience with someone, we also are creating a self that is sexy and desirable. When we are rejected or when we fail to perform, that image is shattered, and we suffer humiliation. Even if we are mature enough to handle such setbacks with ease, there is disappointment and a need to move on to better things. When we bite into a delicious piece of cake, we have an underlying personal narrative about food that accompanies the pleasure; for example, “What am I doing? What about my resolve to avoid sugar and eat healthy? Why do I do these things? What the hell is wrong with me anyway?!” Or maybe it’s more like, “That’s okay, I can do this if I want to, I am not a child, I don’t have to worry.” The self-talk serves the need to make sense of the experience within the context of our picture of who we are. Finally, as we enjoy the ocean breezes, we may be thinking, “I just love the ocean! I wish I lived here. Maybe when I retire I can come move to this town,” or else, “This is nice. I want to make a family tradition of coming here every year.” Then we become The Person Who Loves the Ocean.

The Buddha doesn’t leave us hanging on the edge of a cliff with our suffering, but rather gives us the Third Noble Truth, which is nirodha, cessation, the end of suffering. When we understand what is happening we are able to let go of craving, clinging, and everything that goes with it, especially the delusion of the separate, unconditioned self. We drop our defenses, stop propping up our image, and allow things to be as they are. Developing the insight to do this is difficult, but it is also possible. The Fourth Noble Truth is the means of doing this, the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. It’s a tall order, but it’s also the key to liberation from suffering.

Childhood’s End

I mark the end of the idyll of childhood as the point of my gradual awakening to the reality of my brothers’ situation. For many years I lived in the sunshine of my companionship with them, when we all were children and our lives were full of fun. The first shadow fell when I must have been in 4th grade or so, around 8 years old. There was an increase in tension around the house from both my parents, my mother in particular. The story was that the school in Rhinebeck could no longer keep Tommy because he was becoming destructive. There had been an incident in which he had put his hand through the glass on a door, and cut himself badly. He would need to move into the State Hospital system, specifically to the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, which had an adolescent unit.

My reaction was to see the whole business as an adventure. I compared our family emergency to a chapter in Little Women, “Dark Days,” about Beth’s descent into her fatal illness. Now we had our very own novel, with our very own Dark Days. “I like Dark Days,” I told my mother, “I think they’re fun.” She groaned. On our first visit to what I thought of as Tommy’s new school, I spent some time walking around the grounds, imitating my brother’s gait with my hands up around my ears, until a staff member told me to get back to the car where I was supposed to be waiting for my parents. I was a bit disappointed not to have been taken for a resident. Later, when we were all together, a resident asked if I was a new girl, and my smart-aleck father said, “No, she’s an old girl.” I was pleased by the question, but had no idea what to make of my father’s joke. Soon after we left Tommy there and went home.

At some point during his stay at that hospital, my brother changed. He never was much of a talker, but he did have a couple of things that he came out with regularly. For example, he always loved getting donuts, and would say, “Take a ride in the donut car!” when he wanted us all to go out and get some. He also knew his abc’s, although he had a tendency to rush through them, ending with “w-x-y-zebrudder!” (because there was a picture of a zebra in his book at that letter). There was a particular bowl he liked with a flower pattern, which we called the flower bowl. It became Tommy’s bowl. We would laugh together, he would sing, he would throw his arm around me when we sat side by side.

The person who replaced that Tommy was far, far away, barely verbal, and unhappy. One Sunday a month my parents and I would drive from Pittsfield to Waltham and visit him, drive around with him for awhile, and then return him to the hospital. On one such occasion we were told that he was in the medical wing. Apparently another resident had stuffed some burning newspapers down his shirt, and he was being treated for second and third degree burns. Lord only knows how the other person got his hands on matches, but then again the state hospital wasn’t known for being a great place to be. We went into his room and saw him there, in bed, wrapped in bandages. He said, “Stay in bed,” demonstrating that he had understood his instructions, and “Drink water.” I felt nothing. The next day I was back in my own world, in school. As I sat in homeroom I thought about how odd it was that the day before I had been witness to my brother in his suffering, and now the world was going on just as it always had been, with no one else the wiser.

(Many years later, when I had taken over from my father as Tommy’s guardian, I got some paperwork from his then-current residential program and read his history. I had never seen it before, specifically the fact that during his stay in Waltham he had received approximately 50 insulin induced coma treatments. My blood ran cold. As I began to consider what this meant, I speculated that Tommy lost much of his functioning as a result of that treatment. Is this true? I honestly don’t know, but it’s as reasonable a story as any other.)

Eventually, Tommy would be moved again to the State Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. The day of the move, I rode in the back seat with him. As we sped along the Massachusetts Turnpike he suddenly became agitated, grabbed my right hand, and bit me, hard. The scar lasted for many years. The people at Northampton eventually “solved” his biting problem by filing his teeth. I don’t think my parents knew this at the time, although they had received reports about biting. We continued to visit him every month. Usually my father would go alone, because my mother just couldn’t stand it, and sometimes I would go with him. I did not know how or what to feel. My emotions had gone numb. I suppose I would just as soon not have gone at all.

Mark in the meantime moved to a school in Berkshire County, nearer to where we lived. His visits home continued at regular intervals, as well as our visits to him. I continued to think of him as my buddy. We made a game of finishing each other’s words, even words of only one syllable. A favorite pastime was the what-would-happen-if-I game (e.g.: “What would happen if I refused to go back to school and screeched really loud and ran out the door and, and, and— threatened to jump out of the car?”). I would come up with ways the adults would take charge, and punishments, and so on, while he would come back with more outrageous responses, until there was nowhere left to go with it, at which point I’d answer, “turn into a great big—“ and he’d finish, “rock!”, thus ending the game.

Eventually, these games became not so much something we did together as something I did to amuse him. My childhood was over.