Re: No-thing-ness in psychotherapy

Hi again. Please delete me, if you feel that my response doesn't belong here for any reason, particularly because I am not a clinician.

This is perhaps one of the most important topics for me,true self. I don't practice a "Buddhist" meditation. However, the practice has naturally opened me up to true self, the thing that I suppose is the goal of much of psychotherapy. I don't know how I would have discovered true self without the aid of meditation.

However, here's the question I keep going back to. How do you maintain a true self in the moment when the moment all around you could just be hell on earth? Someone who knows his or her true self can sense the rightness of situation. He or she can do their best to take good care of the moment to improve life now so that possibly in the future the moment is truer to one's self. Yet, I believe that it takes a tremendous skill, I don't know what to call it, not to be pulled into the turmoil of a "bad" moment, or a bad life situation in general. Fear, anger, jealousy, negative emotions override the true self, unless the true self is very strong.

That brings me to "detachement." Since I don't practice Buddhist meditation, maybe I just don't understand detachment. Detachment, from my experience, means staying with the true self, the strong adult self, which enables me to live without being pulled into depression and turmoil. Easier said than done often. However, when I read about detachment, or I discuss it with people who are themselves trying to understand the concept, the impression that I receive is that rather than building a strong healthy adult true self that does naturally exist, many people are being taught in books and in quick seminars to numb themselves from their emotions. If this is detachment, I wouldn't want to practice it. Numbness, from my experience, only cuts off the true self, creating anxiety and depression.

So that leads to my last observation. Living in the moment, detached from one's feelings, sounds like a good idea, and even is ideal, if enough of life is tolerable. However, for many people trauma, turmoil, intolerable living conditions make living in the moment very hard. Sometimes I think that this is a goal, but easiest practiced by monks willing to live as bare foot beggars or the very wealthy. It takes not only creating an healthy inner life to hold onto the true self, but the outer life also has to reflect, eventually, the true self.

So what about the reality of the external life when attempting to live in the moment? There's an inner true self that eventually needs to be manifested in the real world, expect possibly for people who are attempting to live an external life as a monk or nun, but even this is would be an example of manifesting the true self in the external world. What happens when reality gets in the way of manifesting true self in the real world? It can happen. Acceptance, because desire causes suffering? But here's the paradox. Then the true self cannot be manifest in the world. This is where detachment, practiced as numbing, could lead to depression and anxiety?

I am very curious about this. It's a question that I can't seem to find the answer for. Maybe I just don't understand this practice in meditation, or it's just a reflection of my ignorance. Please delete me if you think that this question is inappropriate. Also, forgive my typing errors. My computer is not computing properly.

Replies:

Re: No-thing-ness in psychotherapy, by Dave Birren, 03/15/02 Re: No-thing-ness in psychotherapy, by Meditator, 03/17/02 Re: No-thing-ness in psychotherapy, by Dave Birren, 03/18/02

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