151


    The drugs that people take for non-medicinal  reasons do more than
    numb pain or enhance  pleasure  or induce perceptual  distortions.
    They  are a weapon  against  the void.  In his book on opium, Jean
    Cocteau wrote that every human activity "takes place in an express
    train hurtling  towards  death." To take drugs, he proposed, is to
    get off that train.  The potent  illusion  that drugs  provide  is
    called  upon  when  the  more  commonplace   illusions  fail,  and
    especially  when  life appears  as nothing  more than  the conduit
    between birth and death. (Luc Sante)(1)


Sante's point provides a welcome balance to all the moralizing in "the
war on drugs".  It also suggests that if we seriously  want to address
the drug problem (preeminently  alcohol, of course) we should consider
not only how but why we run away from the void.


Cocteau sees our problem  as death, an understanding  consistent  with
much   of  the  best  recent   work   in  psychotherapy.   Existential
psychologists  such as Ernest Becker and Irvin Yalom believe  that our
primary  repression  is not sexual  wishes, as Freud believed, but the
awareness that we are going to die. This paper, however, will offer an
interpretation  of  Buddhism  that  makes  a  subtle  yet  significant
distinction  between  fear of death  and dread  of the void: our worst
problem  is not death, a fear which still keeps the feared  thing at a
distance by projecting  it into the future, but the more immediate and
terrifying  (because quite valid) suspicion each of us has that "I" am
not real right now.

Sakyamuni  Buddha did not use psychoanalytic  terms, but in trying  to
understand  the Buddhist  claim about anatman, the denial  of self, we
can benefit  from  the concept  of repression  and  the return  of the
repressed in symbolic form. If something (a mental wish, accord-

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ing to Freud) makes me uncomfortable and I do not want to cope with it
consciously, I can choose to ignore or "forget" it.  This allows me to
concentrate  on something  else, yet what has been repressed  tends to
return to consciousness anyway.  What is not consciously admitted into
awareness  irrupts  in obsessive  ways  --  symptoms  --  that  affect
consciousness  with precisely  those qualities  it strives to exclude.
What might this imply about anatman?

Buddhism  analyzes the sense-  of-self into sets of impersonal  mental
and physical  phenomena, whose  interaction  creates  the illusion  of
self-consciousness  --  i.e., that consciousness is the attribute of a
self.   The  death-repression  emphasized  by  existential  psychology
transforms the Oedipal complex into what Norman Brown calls an Oedipal
project: the  attempt  to become  father  of oneself, i.e., one's  own
origin.  The child wants to conquer death by becoming  the creator and
sustainer  of his/her own life.  Buddhism  agrees with this but shifts
the  emphasis:  the  Oedipal  project  is  more  the  attempt  of  the
developing   sense-of-self   to  attain   autonomy,  like   Descartes'
supposedly  self-sufficient  consciousness.  It is the  quest  to deny
one's  groundlessness   by  becoming  one's  own  ground:  the  ground
(socially conditioned and maintained but nonetheless illusory) we know
as being an independent person.

If  so,  the  Oedipal   project   derives  from  our  intuition   that
self-consciousness is not something "self-  existing" (svabhava) but a
mental construct.  Consciousness  is more like the surface of the sea:
dependent  on unknown  depths  that it cannot  grasp  because  it is a
manifestation  of them.  The  problem  arises  when  this  conditioned
consciousness wants to ground itself -- i.e., to make itself real.  If
the sense-of-self  is a construct, it can attempt  to real-ize  itself
only by objectifying itself in some fashion in the world. The ego-self
is  this  never-ending   project   to  objectify   oneself,  something
consciousness  can no more do than a hand can grasp  itself  or an eye
can see itself.

The consequence  of this perpetual  failure  is that the sense-of-self
has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense-of-lack, which it always tries
to  escape.   In  deconstructive   terms,  the  ineluctable  trace  of
nothingness  in our being, of death in our life, is a feeling of lack.
The return of the repressed  in the distorted  form of a symptom shows
us how to link this basic yet hopeless  project with the symbolic ways
we try to make ourselves  real in the world.  We experience  this deep
sense of lack as the feeling that "there is something  wrong with me,"
but of course  that feeling  manifests, and we respond  to it, in many
different  ways.  In its "purer" forms lack appears  as an ontological
guilt or anxiety that becomes  almost unbearable  because  it gnaws on
one's very core.  For that reason  ontological  guilt  wants to become
guilt  for something, because  we then know how to atone  for it;  and
anxiety is eager to objectify into


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fear of something, because  we have ways to defend  ourselves  against
feared things.

The problem  with objectifications  is that no object can ever satisfy
if it's not really an object we want.  When we do not understand  what
is actually motivating  us --  because what we think we want is only a
sym  ptom  of something  else  (according  to Buddhism, our desire  to
become real, which is essentially  a spiritual yearning) --  we end up
compulsive. Then the neurotic's anguish and despair are not the result
of his symptoms  but their  source;  those symptoms  are necessary  to
shield  him from  the tragedies  that  the rest  of us are  better  at
repressing: death,  meaninglessness,  groundlessness.  "The  irony  of
man's condition  is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety
of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and
so we must shrink  from being fully alive."(Becker,1973,pp.181-82).(2)
From the Buddhist  perspective, if the autonomy  of self-consciousness
is a delusion which can never quite shake off its shadow-feeling  that
"something  is wrong with me," it will need to rationalize  that sense
of inadequacy somehow.


Such  a  critique   shifts   our  focus  from  the  terror  of  future
annihilation to the anguish of a groundless- ness experienced now.  On
this account, even fear of death and desire for immortality  symbolize
something  else;  they become symptomatic  of our vague intuition that
the  ego-self  is  not  a hard-core  of  consciousness  but  a  mental
construction, the axis  of a web spun  to hide the void.  Those  whose
constructions are badly damaged, the mad, are uncomfortable to be with
because they remind us of that fact.

This paper will argue  for the above  position  in two ways.  First we
shall look at what psychotherapy  has discovered  about guilt, anxiety
and projection, to see if they  may be understood  as different  symp-
toms manifesting  the same problem: a repressed sense-of-lack  that is
intrinsic to the sense-of-self.

This  will  be followed  by a Buddhist  interpretation  of lack, which
agrees  with  much  of  the  psychotherapeutic  understanding  of  our
situation  but offers  a way to resolve  our unhappy  state.  Buddhism
traces  human  suffering  (duhkha)  back to desire  and ignorance, and
relates  all  of  them  to our  lack  of self.  The  sense-of-self  is
deconstructed  into interacting  mental and physical  processes, whose
relativity  leads  to post-structuralist  conclusions: the  supposedly
simple self is an economy of forces. The Buddhist solution to its lack
is simple  although  not easy: if it is nothingness  we dread, then we
should become no-thing.  The dichotomy  between being and nonbeing can
be conflated  by yielding  to the  side  we have  been  rejecting.  In
ceasing  to  deny  my  groundlessness  I discover, paradoxically, that
utter  groundlessness  (nonbeing)  is equivalent  to full groundedness
(being). This reveals that from the very beginning


                                154

there has never been any real lack, because  there has never  been any
self-  existing  self apart from the world.  The problem  of desire is
solved when the "bad infinity" of unsatisfiable lack transforms into a
"good infinity"  which needs nothing  and therefore  can freely become
anything.


GUILT

Guilt has become an immense problem for modern man, and it seems to be
getting  worse.  In Civilization  and  its Discontents(1930/1989,p.97)
Freud understands a heightening sense of guilt as the price we pay for
advances in human culture, but the price is so high that guilt has now
become   "the   most   important   problem   in  the  development   of
civilization."  Norman O.  Brown(1961)  sees social organization  as a
structure of shared guilt: the burden is so heavy it must be shared in
order  to be expiated  collectively.  According  to Otto  Rank, (1958,
p.194)  contemporary  man  is  neurotic  because  he  suffers  from  a
consciousness  of sin just  as much as premodern  man did, but without
believing in the religious conception  of sin, which leaves us without
a means  of expiation.  In  the  rituals  of archaic  man  a sense  of
indebtedness was balanced by the belief that the debt could be repaid;
today we are oppressed by the realization  that the burden of guilt is
unpayable.  Even the possibility of expiation is denied us when we are
not aware that what is bothering us is guilt.  Hence unconscious guilt
accumulates  individually  and  collectively, with  consequences  that
periodically  become disastrous.  Is this the price of progress, or do
we have a bad conscience about what we are doing to each other --  and
to the earth? Or should the source of our guilt be distinguished  from
the reasons we invent to rationalize it?


Freud traced  guilt back to the biologically-transmitted  memory  of a
prehistoric   primal  deed,  sons  banding  together   to  kill  their
autocratic  father.  With each generation this process is internalized
anew in the Oedipal  complex;  the same instinctive  wishes  recur and
cannot be concealed from the superego, producing guilt.  The child has
death-  wishes toward parents  yet is also dependent  upon their love.
Freud  saw  a  parallel  between  the  libidinal  development   of  an
individual and the socializing process of civiliza- tion: both require
the internalization of a superego, leading to inevitable conflict with
instinctual urges.

It is fascinating  to observe the primal deed reenacted  with Freud as
psychoanalytic  father and Jung, Adler, etc.  as the rebellious  sons.
Just  as striking  is that  Freud  the  secularized  Jew  locates  the
beginnings  of our "original sin" in a moral infringement  against the
Father which occurred at the beginning  of history and has been passed
down biologically since then. As in the Old Testament, we


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are not personally  at fault for the initial violation, yet we inherit
the  consequences.  Likewise, we cannot  help  it that  in infancy  we
develop  death-wishes  toward  our parents, but, given that such death
wishes   arise   toward   the  ones  who  nurture   us,  guilt  is  an
understandable   reaction.   Both   myths   explain   the  origin   of
guilt-feelings by giving us moral reasons which parallel the way guilt
is believed  to operate  in everyday  life: when we do (or want to do)
something wrong, we feel bad about it. The mechanism is presumed to be
the  same.   Original  sin  may  be  proto-  historical,  biologically
inherited, pre-conscious, yet it is only a repressed  version  of what
happens whenever  we infringe  against the natural order.  In terms of
the distinction that the next paragraph will make between neurotic and
ontological guilt, all guilt is neurotic for Genesis and Freud because
we have all sinned.

If, however, the Oedipal  project  is the sense-of-self's  attempt  to
become self-grounding  and to end its dependence on others by becoming
autonomous  (i.e., self-  conscious), then the guilt that arises  need
not be traced back to ambivalent  wishes, for it has a more primordial
origin  in the sense  of lack inevitably  deriving  from the repressed
intuition  of self-  consciousness  that it does not self-exist.  Such
basic "guilt" is not neurotic but ontological. It is not a consequence
of something  I have done, but of the fact that I am--  yet only "sort
of".  Ontological  guilt arises  from the contradiction  between  this
socially- conditioned sense that I am and the suspicion that I am not.
Their clash is the sense-of-  lack, which generates the I should be...
The tragedy is that I "awaken" into being only to be confronted  by my
lack of being.  Schizophrenics  feel guilty just for existing  because
this contradiction is less repressed for them.

The prehistories  of Genesis  and Freud's primal deed mythologize  the
fact  that  this  mode  of  awareness  is  not  some  natural  way  of
experiencing  the world  but  historically-conditioned.  According  to
Erich  Neumann(1973), the full  emergence  of the  ego  abolishes  the
original  paradisal  situation;  this  "is  experienced  as guilt, and
moreover  as original  guilt, a fall."  The evolution  of homo sapiens
into self-  consciousness alienated the human species from the rest of
the  world, which  became  objectified  for  us as we became  subjects
looking  out  at  it.  This  original  sin  is passed  down  to  every
generation  as the linguistically-conditioned  and socially-maintained
delusion that each of us is a consciousness  existing separately  from
the world.  Yet if this is a conditioning it raises the possibility of
a deconditioning, or a reconditioning.

Why  do we need  to feel  guilty, and accept  suffering, sickness  and
death  as condign  punishment? What  role  does  that  guilt  play  in
determining  the meaning  of our lives? I think the best answer  comes
not from Freud but from an existentialist. "Original sin: a new


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sense has been invented  for pain."  (Nietzsche)  Even the feeling  of
wrongdoing  gives  us some  sense  of control  over our own destinies,
because an explanation  has been provided for our sense of lack.  "The
ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion
of guilt is necessary  for an animal that cannot  enjoy life, in order
to  organize  a life  of  nonenjoyment."(Brown, 1961, p.270).  In  The
Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche observes that man will suffer readily if
he is given a reason for his suffering.  Since nothing is more painful
to  endure  than  pure  lack, we need  to project  it onto  something,
because  only thus can we get a handle on it.  If that object is found
outside  we react  with  anger, if directed  inside  it becomes  guilt
(introjected  anger, according to psychoanalysis).  In "Some Character
Types  met  with  in  Psycho-analytic  Work"  (1916), Freud  describes
"criminals from a sense of guilt" whose guilt feelings are so powerful
that committing a misdeed actually brings relief -- which makes sense,
if what they crave  is something  specific  to be able  to atone  for.
"Guilt implies responsibility; and however painful guilt is, it may be
preferable  to helplessness."(Schmideberg,1956,p.476).  We are all too
familiar with collective examples of the other blaming system: racism,
anti-  semitism,  nationalism,  etc.   If  social  organization  is  a
structure  of shared  guilt, what better  solution  to one's  communal
sense  of lack than to project  it onto a communal  scapegoat? This is
the ressentiment  that Nietzsche(1968a;1968b)  detected in the soul of
modern man:

    The  spirit  of  revenge: my friends, that, up  to  now, has  been
    mankind's chief concern;  and where there was suffering, there was
    always supposed to be punishment.
    As far  as man has  thought, he has  introduced  the  bacillus  of
    revenge  in things.  He has even  made  God  ill  with  it, he has
    deprived existence in general of its innocence.


This  reveals  the problem  with  postulating  an original  sin as the
ultimate  cause  of our  suffering: instead  of  helping  us  end  our
sense-of-lack, it reifies our lack by providing it with a pedigree. It
also maintains  the institutions, religious  and otherwise, that claim
to have control over its absolution.

In contrast, Buddhism  does  not  reify  the  sense  of lack  into  an
original  sin, even though our problems with attachment  and ignorance
are  historically-conditioned.  This  is an important  way nondualisms
like Buddhism  differ  from theism.  If you believe  in an all-loving,
all-  powerful God, our suffering can be justified only by postulating
a primal act of disobedience  against Him.  Sakyamuni  Buddha declared
that he was not interested  in the metaphysical  issue of origins, and
emphasized  that he had one thing only to teach: duhkha and the end of
duhkha, our suffering  now and the path  to end that  suffering.  This
means the

                                157


Buddhist  path is nothing  other  than a way to resolve  our sense  of
lack.  Since there was no primeval  offense and no expulsion  from the
Garden, our situation  turns out to be paradoxical: the actual problem
is our deeply-repressed fear that our groundlessness/no- thing-ness is
a problem.  When  I stop trying  to fill  up that  hole  at my core by
vindicating  or  real-izing  myself  in some  symbolic  way, something
happens to it -- and me.

This is easy to misunderstand, for the letting-go that is necessary is
not directly accessible  to consciousness.  The ego cannot absolve its
own  lack  because  the ego  is the  other  side  of that  lack.  When
ontological guilt is experienced more "purely" -- as the unobjectified
feeling that "something is wrong with me" --  there seems to be no way
to cope with it, so normally we become conscious of it as the neurotic
guilt of "not being good enough" in this or that particular  way.  For
Buddhism, the guilt expended  in these situations  should be converted
back into ontological  guilt, and that guilt  must be endured  without
evasion;  the method for doing this is simply nondual awareness, which
meditation  cultivates.  The result  is that  one  becomes  profoundly
guilty and feels completely worthless, not because of anything one has
done but simply because one is.  Letting-go of the mental devices that
sustain  my self-esteem, I stand  alone  and vulnerable.  Such  guilt,
experienced  in  or rather  as the  core  of  one's  being, cannot  be
resolved  by the ego-self;  there is nothing one can do with it except
be conscious of it and bear it and let it burn itself out, like a fire
that exhausts its fuel, which in this case is the sense-  of-self.  If
we cultivate  the  ability  to dwell  as it, then  ontological  guilt,
finding nothing else to be guilty for, consumes the sense-of-self  and
thereby itself too.

Anxiety

It can be no coincidence  that everything  just said about  guilt must
now be restated  in terms  of anxiety.  The first  seems  to be a more
limited  case of the second.  Even  ontological  guilt  has an object:
one's  own sense  of self, for it is the self that the self feels  bad
about.  In anxiety, however, lack attains its originary form, which is
formless. Cultivating such objectless anxiety is the most direct route
to realizing our own formlessness.

Freud  gradually  realized  that  anxiety  is  at  the  heart  of  the
humanization  process.  He first understood  anxiety as a byproduct of
repression but soon reversed himself.  "It was not the repression that
created the anxiety;  the anxiety  was there earlier  and created  the
repression."  This makes ego rather than libido  the locus of anxiety.
Although  Freud  emphasized  that his concept  of the unconscious  was
derived from the theory of repression, he never suc-


                                158

ceeded in answering to his own satisfaction why there is repression in
the first place.  In neurotic phobias the symptom has been constructed
in order to avoid an outbreak  of anxiety, which traces  neurosis  and
repression  back to anxiety.  But that just pushes the problem  back a
step:

    We have once more come unawares upon the riddle which has so often
    confronted us: whence does neurosis come --  what is its ultimate,
    its  own  peculiar   raison   d'etre?  After   tens  of  years  of
    psycho-analytic  labors, we are as much  in the  dark  about  this
    problem as we were at the start.(Freud, 1923/1989)


In the next generation  Harry Stack Sullivan had the most to say about
anxiety, and he perceived an essential  connection  between it and the
formation of the self.  Anxiety originally  arises out of the infant's
apprehension  of the disapproval of significant  persons in his world.
Like  Freud, Sullivan  viewed  anxiety  as  "cosmic,"  something  that
invades  us  totally, and  the  self  is formed  out  of the  infant's
necessity  to deal  with such anxiety-creating  experiences, to defend
against  that anxiety.  The self "comes  into being  as a dynamism  to
preserve the feeling of security."  This pertains not only to behavior
but to awareness itself:

    The  self   comes   to  control   awareness,  to  restrict   one's
    consciousness  of what is going on in one's situation very largely
    by  the   instrumentality   of  anxiety,  with,  as  a  result,  a
    dissociation  from personal awareness  of those tendencies  of the
    personality which are not included or incorporated in the approved
    structure of the self(Sullivan, in May, 1977,pp.145-46)

We could  not ask for  a clearer  formulation: it is not  merely  that
something is denied, for that denial is what constitutes the self.  So
much   for  the  nobility   of  Cartesian   ego-   consciousness:  the
sense-of-self is reduced from the locus of rationality to a pattern of
evasions.  No  wonder  it  feels  so  uncomfortable, for  coping  with
discomfort is its role;  and no wonder we never realize who or what we
are, for such  a consciousness  has  no being, only  a function.  This
makes the sense-of-self  into a double  lack: an ungrounded  awareness
whose task is to repress anxiety.

Just as ontological  guilt wants to become a more specific fault, so I
can get a handle  on what is wrong  with me, anxiety  wants  to become
fear. Freud distinguished between anxiety (in which there is no object
threat)  and fear (in which  there  is), but psychoanalysts  since him
have  found  that  distinction  difficult  to  maintain  in  practice.
According  to Rollo May, "anxiety is the basic underlying  reaction...
and fear  is the expression  of the  same  capacity  in its  specific,
objectivated  form." Anxiety "is objectless because it strikes at that
basis of the psychological structure on which the

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perception  of  one's  self  as distinct  from  the  world  of objects
occurs."(1977,pp.198.182)  According  to my  Buddhist  interpretation,
such  pure anxiety  accompanies  the ego-self's  intuition  of its own
unreality; how reassuring, then, to project this outside as the threat
posed by an external object.  If the self is constituted by the denial
of anxiety, as Sullivan  seems to say, to objectify  anxiety into fear
will also subjectify  the sense-of-self  as that which copes  with the
fear -- and as that which needs to be protected from the threat.

If so, then ending anxiety (if that is possible)  also implies  ending
the sense-of-  self as something autonomous and self-grounding.  Freud
said  that  what  the ego fears  in anxiety  "is  in the nature  of an
overthrow or extinction." Rollo May adds that in anxiety "the security
base of the individual is threatened, and since it is in terms of this
security base that the individual has been able to experience  himself
as a self in relation to objects, the distinction  between subject and
object also breaks down."(May,1977,p.183).  No Buddhist  could express
it better.  For  psychoanalysis, such  breakdown  is  a definition  of
psychosis. For Buddhism, it may describe enlightenment:

    Where there is an object  there is a subject, but not where  there
    is no object. The absence of an object results in the absence also
    of a subject, and not merely in that of grasping.  It is thus that
    there arises the cognition  which is homogeneous, without  object,
    indiscriminate  and supermundane.  The tendencies  to treat object
    and subject as distinct and real entities areforsaken, and thought
    is   established    in   just    the   true   nature    of   one's
    thourht(Vasubandhu, 1964).



The issue becomes  whether  the subject-object  distinction  can break
down in different  ways: why the mystic  can swim in the same sea that
drowns  the  psychotic.

In sum, the Buddhist  critique  of ego-self  implies  that anxiety  is
essential  to the  ego because  it is the  ego's  response  to its own
groundlessness, something  more immediately  threatening  than fear of
death sometime  in the future.  This theme is familiar  in existential
philosophy   as  well  but  it  is  uncommon  in  psychoanalysis.   In
Existential  Psychotherapy  Irvin  Yalom discusses  what he calls  the
"ur-anxiety"  of  groundlessness  yet  concludes  that,  unlike  death
anxiety  (to which  he devotes  almost  half his book)  anxiety  about
groundlessness  is  not  evident  in  our  daily  experience.  (Yalom,
1980,pp.221-22).(4) Is such anxiety hard to recognize because it is so
rare -- confined, perhaps, to abstracted philosophers -- or because it
is so wellrepressed?

In an influential  essay "Life Fear and Death Fear", Otto Rank divided
anxiety into two opposed but complementary fears. Life fear is anxiety
in the face of standing out from nature and becoming


                                160


an  individual, thereby  losing  connection  with  a greater
whole.  Death  fear  is anxiety  in the face  of extinction, of losing
individuality  and dissolving back into the whole.  "Between these two
fear possibilities, the individual  is thrown  back and forth  all his
life".(Rank, in Yalom, 1980,pp.141-42).  In Existential  Psychotherapy
Yalom develops this into his own dual paradigm of death-denial through
individuation  or fusion.  The psychological defense of specialness is
trying  to  become  different  and  better  than  everyone  else, thus
deserving  of a better fate.  The defense  of fusion is hiding  in the
group, which includes expecting  to be taken care of by others.  Yalom
employs these defenses  against death to explain the behavior  of many
of his clients, despite  the fact that many of them display  little if
any obvious death anxiety.

My point is that Yalom's paradigm need not be limited to the use Yalom
finds  for it, for specialness  and fusion  can work  even  better  as
defenses  against  a sense of ontological  lack.  If I am driven by an
unacknowledged intuition of my groundlessness, I can try to compensate
for that by becoming someone special who stands out from the crowd and
thereby  hope  to become  real  by being  acknowledged  by the  crowd.
Conversely, I may  try  to resolve  my sense  of lack  by fusing  with
others, in order to be no different  from them: "there's nothing wrong
with me;  I'm just like everyone else." In the first case I compensate
by striving  to become more real than others, in the second I reassure
myself by becoming no less real than others seem to be.

Until recently the emphasis has been on a more communal version of the
latter.  Society  may well  be a structure  of shared  guilt, as Brown
says, but it is more obviously  a structure  of shared anxiety.  Today
our problem with anxiety  is greater  for at least two reasons: a more
individualistic society produces people with a stronger sense-of-self,
therefore  with stronger anxiety, and it provides fewer effective ways
to cope  with that anxiety.  Religion  is the traditional  consolation
because  it reassures  me that my anxiety will be put to rest, my lack
filled in, my groundlessness  grounded  in God or nirvana.  If this is
our deepest  need, the death of God will only result in the search for
an equivalent.  The more individuated can try to deify their own egos,
but it is difficult  to become one's own sun.  Most people  require  a
more  collective, more objectified  deity.  Herein  lies  much  of the
appeal  of nationalism, and socialism's  claim to embody  "the will of
the  people."  "If  modernization  can  be  described  as  a spreading
condition  of homelessness, then  socialism  can be understood  as the
promise of a new home." (berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973).

Herein, too, is a key  to understanding  many  of the  horrors  of the
twentieth century.

                                161


    Totalitarianism  is a cultural  neurotic  symptom  of the need for
    community  --  a symptom  in the respect  that it is grasped  as a
    means  of  allaying   anxiety  resulting   from  the  feelings  of
    powerlessness   and   helplessness   of  the  isolated,  alienated
    individuals  produced in a society in which complete individualism
    has been the dominant goal. Totalitarianism is the substitution of
    collectivism for community, as Tillich has pointed out. (May,1977,
    p.212)(5).


In the passage  from  which  this  quotation  is taken, May  looks  no
further  than the need for community;  he does not consider  what that
need might  express.  This is no minor  issue  if our rapidly-evolving
"global  village"  means  there is no return  to the small towns  that
sustained almost all of us until a few generations ago.  Nostalgia may
mythologize  those  communities, but they provided  the security  of a
common world-  view and the hope of redemption in one symbolic form or
another.  Without that possibility, the question becomes whether there
is  another  alternative  to mass  collectivism, a different  type  of
community, in  which  individuals  are  able  to  take  more  personal
responsibility  for coping with increased anxiety and resolving  their
own ontological lack.

That brings us back to the possibility of ending anxiety.  Again, most
of what  was said  earlier  about  ending  guilt  also  applies  here,
transposed from a minor to a major key. But what is more noticeable in
terms   of  anxiety   is  the   almost   unanimous   agreement   among
existentialists  and psychoanalysts that anxiety cannot be eliminated,
only reduced  and kept in its proper place.  Many psychologists  doubt
that  anxiety  should  be  eliminated, viewing  it as a spur  to, or a
necessary  byproduct  of, heightened  awareness.  Liddell  notes  that
"anxiety accompanies intellectual  activity as its shadow."(quoted  in
May, 1977,p.46).

For a different  view we must turn again  to religion, which confronts
us with the task of demythologizing  transformation  from consolation,
of distinguishing  possibility from wishful thinking.  For the role of
anxiety  in the religious  life, I can find no better account than the
short chapter which concludes Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety. In
a few unforgettable  pages Kierkegaard delineates the paradox that, if
there  is  to be an end  to anxiety, it  can  be  found  only  through
anxiety.  Understood  and  experienced  in  the  right  way  (one  who
misunderstands  this  anxiety  is lost, he says), anxiety  is a school
which roots out everything finite and petty in us, and only then takes
us wherever we want to go.  As with guilt, the path of integration  is
an awareness  that does not flee anxiety  but endures  it, in order to
recuperate  those parts of the psyche which split off and returned  to
haunt us in projected, symbolic form. If the way to integrate guilt is
to be profoundly  guilty, so the way to integrate anxiety is to become
completely  anxious: to let formless, unprojected  anxiety gnaw on all
those "finite ends" I have at-

                                162

tempted   to  secure  myself  with;   so  that,  by  devouring   these
attachments, anxiety devours me too and, like the parasite  that kills
its host, consumes itself. (see Kierkegaard, 1957,pp.155-62).

To learn how to be anxious is to learn the ultimate, says Kierkegaard.
The  school  of anxiety  is the path  to true  freedom, which  is what
remains after we have been purged of all the comforting hiding- places
we automatically flee to whenever we feel insecure.  Only such anxiety
is "absolutely  educative, because  it consumes  all finite  ends  and
discovers all their deceptiveness."  The curriculum  of this school is
possibility, "the  weightiest  of  all  categories."  No  matter  what
tragedies  actually  befall us, they are always far lighter  than what
could  happen.   When  a  person   "graduates   from  the  school   of
possibility,...  he knows better  than a child knows his ABC's that he
can  demand  absolutely   nothing  of  life  and  that  the  terrible,
perdition, and annihilation  live  next door to every  man".  It is an
exercise in awareness: dredging up all the psychic securities  we have
hedged  around us and then "forgotten," until we found ourselves  in a
safe but constricted little world.  Consciousness of what could happen
at any moment deconstructs this comfortable cocoon by reminding us, at
every  moment, of  our  mortality;  in  psychotherapeutic  terms, this
demolishes one's unconscious power linkages or supports.  "He who sank
in possibility...  sank absolutely, but then in turn  he emerged  from
the depth of the abyss lighter  than all the troublesome  and terrible
things  in life."  Such a person  no longer  fears fate, "because  the
anxiety within him has already fashioned  fate and has taken away from
him absolutely  all that any fate  could  take  away."  This spiritual
discipline  stands  in  striking  contrast  to  the  sense  of  divine
protection  that is usually taken to be a secular benefit of religious
faith. Kierkegaard is no less interested in faith, yet for him it does
not come so cheaply.  Authentic faith is not a refuge from anxiety but
its fruit.

If the ego-self is a mental-construction whose function is to preserve
a feeling of security  (as Sullivan puts it), then such an exercise in
deconstructing  security should eliminate that sense-of-self.  Usually
much  of  our  mental  activity  is structured  by the  need  to  have
reassuring  boltholes, where  we can flee  when  our self-  esteem  is
threatened. A trivial example: when I lose a chess game to an opponent
with a much lower rating, I automatically compensate: official ratings
show that I am really the better player.  Fixed by repetition, the web
of such  automatizations  constitutes  my character  and therefore  my
unfreedom: all the ways I habitually run away from open encounter with
the world. For Buddhism as well as Kierkegaard, I must let go of these
thought-props,  which  is  to  suffer.   Without  these  defenses   to
self-esteem, I die a thousand little ego-deaths -- or walk on the edge
of a thousand swords, to use the Zen metaphor. In Kierkegaard's terms,
such thought-props are the


                                163

finitudes  which must be rooted out to reveal  the infinitude  that is
our true ground.

Projection

Our discussions  of guilt and anxiety need to be supplemented  by some
reference to their objectifications: projection and transference.  The
apparently-objective  world is unconsciously structured by the ways we
seek to secure  ourselves  within  it.  We meet again  the unfortunate
paradox  that precisely  this attempt to ground myself in the world is
what separates me from it.

In The Ego and the Id Freud observed that the dynamically  unconscious
repressed  is not capable of becoming  conscious  in the ordinary way,
and suggests  that "anything  arising from within that seeks to become
conscious    must    try   to   transform    itself    into   external
perceptions."(Freud, 1923/1989, pp. 12-13).  That insight is now taken
for granted, yet the way Freud expresses it also takes for granted our
commonsense  bifurcation  between  subject  and  object  even  as  the
phenomena he refers to -- projection and transference -- challenge it.
Such  formulations  assume  that  the  locus  of  the  unconscious  is
someplace within me and that the objective world is what it appears to
be, something external to me. Like most of us all the time and perhaps
all of us most of the time, Freud takes for granted the objectivity of
the  world  --  yet  this  is  a  dangerous  assumption, given  Kant's
Copernican  revolution  and  the more  recent  discoveries  of quantum
physics and cognitive psychology. It is also a difficult assumption to
become aware of, if we constitute the world in a manner which conceals
the fact that we have constituted it:

    Perhaps the most potent defense of all [against death-anxiety]  is
    simply reality  as it is experienced--that  is, the appearance  of
    things....appearances  enter the service  of denial: we constitute
    the  world  in such  a way  that  it appears  independent  of  our
    constitution.  To constitute the world as an empirical world means
    to   constitute   it  as  something   independent   of  ourselves.
    (Yalom,1980,p.222)(6)

Why is this such a potent  defense  against  anxiety? Why do we forget
that  we (for it is a social  construction: we learn  to perceive  the
world  the way others  do) have constituted  the world? Yalom  relates
this  to a repressed  fear  of groundlessness, which  makes  us try to
secure ourselves by stabilizing  the world we are in.  We need a world
of dependable, self-existing  things, fixable  in objective  time  and
space  and interacting  in ways  we can learn  to manipulate.  Once  a
predictable   world  has  been  automatized,  we  can  concentrate  on
achieving our ends within that world. However, there is another reason
for "forgetting" if the sense-of-self which is in that world is itself
constituted at the same time: in that case these acts of


                                164


constitution  cannot be accessible to self-consciousness  because they
are also the foundations  of self-consciousness.  Then to repress  the
fact that my objective  world  is constituted  is also to repress  the
fact that I am constituted.

The  implication  of this  for  projection  and  transference  is that
unconscious  phenomena need not be sought in some undetermined  mental
place within me but are to be found embodied  in my world.  Then, if I
want  to find my unconscious, I should  look  at the structures  of my
world, and if we want  to locate  our collective  unconscious  we must
look to the shared structures of our social world.

    What  really  happens  [in transference]  is not that the neurotic
    patient  "transfers"  feelings  he had toward mother  or father to
    wife  or therapist.  Rather, the neurotic  is one  who  in certain
    areas never developed  beyond the limited and restricted  forms of
    experience characteristic  of the infant.  Hence in later years he
    perceives wife or therapist through the same restricted, distorted
    "spectacles"  as he perceived father or mother.  The problem is to
    be understood in terms of perception and relatedness to the world.
    (May, 1983, p.154)

However, this does not mean  that developing  into the less restricted
forms of experience  characteristic  of most adults  is a satisfactory
solution.  The "pathology of normalcy" (Fromm) or the "psychopathology
of the average" (Maslow)  are no answer insofar as the child is father
to the man and we remain children "blown up by age." The difference is
that the infant's world is determined  by his parents', but as we grow
up our need for security  becomes invested in wider social structures,
which emphasize  competing  for socially-  agreed security  and status
symbols: wealth, prizes, power and so forth.

Jung described projection as leading to a dream-like experience of the
world:

    The  effect  of projection  is to isolate  the  subject  from  his
    environment, since instead  of a real relation  to it there is now
    only  an illusory  one.  Projections  change  the world  into  the
    replica  of one's unknown  face.  In the last analysis, therefore,
    they lead to an auto-erotic  or autistic  condition  in which  one
    dreams  a  world  whose  reality   remains  forever  unattainable.
    (Jung,1958,p.8).

Jung  also noted  that people  in the process  of individuation  takes
their  projections  back into  themselves.  To understand  better  the
principles  involved  in such de-projection, we can benefit  from  the
fifth  part  of Spinoza's  Ethics,(1677/1982)  "Of  the  Power  of the
Intellect, or of Human  Freedom", w hich discusses  how human  freedom
may be realized.  Proposition three is: "An emotion which is a passion
ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and


                                165


distinct  idea of it." Do we passively  suffer  from the way our minds
work  or  are  we "self-determined"  because  we understand  how  they
function?  Proposition   two   makes   it   more   evident   that,  in
psychotherapeutic terms, this is the difference between an unconscious
transference/projection  and  the awareness  of what  we are doing  to
ourselves: "If we remove a disturbance  of the mind or an emotion away
from the thought of an external  cause, and join it to other thoughts,
then love or hatred towards  the external  cause, as well as waverings
of the mind which originate from these emotions, are destroyed."

Earlier in the Ethics Spinoza defines love and hatred as pleasure  and
pain, respectively, accompanied by the idea of an external cause. In a
similar fashion, fear might be defined as "anxiety accompanied  by the
idea of an external  cause" and guilt as "anxiety  accompanied  by the
idea of an internal cause (i.e., oneself)."  The solutions are similar
in each case: to break  the association  between  the emotion  and its
supposedly  external  (or introjected, in the  case  of guilt)  cause,
which is what my argument has been recommending in order to experience
pure ontological  guilt and anxiety, unrelieved  by any projection  or
introjection.

If   something   about   a  person   particularly   bothers   me,  the
psychotherapeutic  approach is to use that as an opportunity  to learn
something about myself, by inquiring into why that affects me. Spinoza
is also pointing  out that if I suffer  psychologically, it is because
my own ways of thinking, alienated  and project-  ed, have put me in a
bind.  Efforts to real-ize myself symbolically  mean I give power over
myself to those persons  and situations  which can grant or refuse the
symbolic reality that I hope will fill up my lack.

Spinoza,  like  Buddhism,  believes   that  genuine  freedom   can  be
actualized  by becoming  aware of the repressed  mental events we have
projected.  If,  for  example, I  want  to  be  respected  by  certain
philosophers, whom I look upon as eminent (usually because others look
upon  them as eminent), this will naturally  affect  the nature  of my
world and the way I feel compelled to act within it.  Spinoza shows me
how to realize  that the opinions  of these  philosophers  do not have
power over my state of mind, but that I give these  people  power over
me by my ways of thinking  about their states  of mind.  In gaining  a
"clear  and distinct  idea" of my desire for their approbation  --  by
becoming aware of it rather than just being motivated  by it --  I can
distinguish my desire from my idea of those people ("the thought of an
external  cause")  and notice  instead  the connections  between  that
desire  and other ideas of mine, such as my desire  to become a famous
thinker  ("join it to other thoughts").  In this way I can free myself
from the "waverings of the mind" arising from fear of their evaluation
and need to be esteemed ("loved") by them. This does not mean I should
become indifferent

                                166

to the  opinions  of others, but  it allows  me to  respond  in a more
self-determined way, informed rather than affected by their views.

Buddhist Duhkha

    A monk whose mind is thus released  cannot be followed and tracked
    out even by the gods...  Even  in this  actual  life, monks, I say
    that a released  person is not to be thoroughly  known.  Though  I
    thus  say and thus preach, some ascetics  and brahmins  accuse  me
    wrongly  and baselessly, saying  that  "the  ascetic  Gotama  is a
    nihilist  and  preaches  the  annihilation, destruction  and  non-
    existence  of an existent being." That is what I am not and do not
    affirm.  Both previously and now I preach duhkha and the cessation
    of duhkha. (Sakyamuni Buddha,Majjhima Nikaya i.135)

I  am  not  aware  of  any  precise   Buddhist   equivalent   for  the
psychoanalytic  concepts of repression and the return of the repressed
as a symptom.  Yet we have already  noticed that Buddhism  does have a
term which corresponds  to the sense-of-lack  as I have been using it,
and by no coincidence  it is probably  the most important  concept  of
all: duhkha.  The Buddha repeatedly summarized his teachings into four
truths: duhkha, the cause of duhkha, the end of duhkha, and how to end
duhkha.  What makes this an equivalent  for lack is that Buddhism sees
an integral relationship between our duhkha and our delusive sense-of-
self. In order to end duhkha, the sense-of-self must be deconstructed.

Duhkha  is  a  Sanskrit  term  meaning  suffering,  pain,  discomfort,
frustration,  etc.  The  first  truth  defines  homo  sapiens  as  the
dissatisfied  animal.  Without confronting  the ultimate source of our
duhkha, any amelioration  in one aspect  of life will only  shift  the
emphasis  to another: from physical pain to psychological  stress, for
example.  That is because, like psychoanalytic  anxiety, duhkha is not
something we have but something we are.

The early commentarial tradition distinguishes  three kinds of duhkha.
What we usually think of as suffering  and discomfort  is all included
in the first, which incorporates  the trauma of birth, illness, worry,
decrepitude, death-fear;  to be bound  to what  one  dislikes;  to  be
separated  from what  one loves, etc.  When  momentarily  free of such
suffering  we are able to contemplate  the second type of duhkha, that
caused by anitya, impermanence.  "Such is the state of life, that none
are happy  but by the anticipation  of change: the change  is nothing;
when we have made it the next  wish is to change  again."  (Dr.  John-
son)  As  long  as there  is  lack, real  life  is  always  elsewhere.
Modernity has aggravated this problem:

    On the one hand, modern identity is open-ended, transitory, liable
    to  ongoing  change.  On the  other  hand, a subjective  realm  of
    identity is the

                                167


    individual's   main  foothold  in  reality.   Something   that  is
    constantly  changing  is  supposed  to  be  the  ens  realissimum.
    Consequently  it should  not  be a surprise  that  modern  man  is
    afflicted with a permanent  identity crisis, a condition conducive
    to considerable nervousness.

    ...The  final  consequence  of all this  can  be put  very  simply
    (though the simplicity is deceptive): modern man has suffered from
    a deepening  condition  of "homelessness."  The  correlate  of the
    migratory  character of his experience  of society and of self has
    been what might be called a metaphysical  loss of "home."  It goes
    without  saying  that this  condition  is psychologically  hard to
    bear.(Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973,pp.74,77.)


The special contribution of Buddhism is how it relates these first two
types of duhkha--dis-ease  and impermanence--to  the structure  of the
sense-of-self:  the  third   kind  of  duhkha   is  that  due  to  the
"conditioned   states,  "  the  physical   and  mental  factors  whose
interaction constitutes the ego-self.  Samadhi, meditative absorption,
enables  us to end our  sense-of-lack  by cultivating  the ability  to
forget oneself, whereby the sense-of-self lets-go of itself.  The rest
of this paper discusses this Buddhist decon- struction.  The following
section presents the ontological and epistemological deconstruction of
the self according  to Buddhist  doctrine.  The final section looks at
that  deconstruction  more  phenomenologically, according  to Buddhist
praxis, in order to understand how it solves the problem of our lack.


Buddhist deconstruction of the self

Buddhism  deconstructs  the sense  of self in two ways: synchronically
into  the five  skandhas, literally  "heaps", and diachronically  into
pratitya-samutpada  "dependent  origination."  These doctrines explain
how the illusion  of self  is constituted  and how it functions.  They
also imply how it may be ended.

The five skandhas are the physical and mental factors that compose the
psychophysical  personality.  They  are usually  translated  as: form,
which includes  the material body with its sense-organs;  feelings and
sensations; perceptions;  mental formations (or volitional tendencies)
including habits and dispositions;  and consciousness, understood here
as the six sense-consciousnesses  (including  mental consciousness  of
mental events).  These are also called  "the five groups of grasping."
All experiences associated with the sense of self can be analyzed into
these  five  "heaps," with  no remainder  outside  them.  There  is no
persisting self or transcendent  soul to be found over and above their
functioning.  The Buddha emphasized  that these five do not constitute
the  self;  their  interaction  creates  the  illusion  of  self.  The
recommended  attitude  is to regard each skandha  "with proper wisdom,
according to reality,


                                168


thus: 'These are not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.'"  As a
result, the  "well-  instructed  noble  disciple, understanding  this,
wearies  of them, becomes  passion-free, and is thereby  emancipated."
(Anatta-Lakkhana  Sutra, "On  the  No-Self  Characteristic,"  Samyutta
Nikaya XXII,54).

Yet the skandha  deconstruction  of self has been overshadowed  by and
even  subsumed  into  pratitya-samutpada, by far  the  most  important
doctrine  in  Buddhism.   The  Buddha  emphasized   that  someone  who
understands   pratitya-samutpada   understands   his   teaching,   and
vice-versa. Dependent- origination explains our experience by locating
all phenomena within a set of twelve factors, each conditioned  by and
conditioning  all the others.  The twelve links of this chain (a later
doctrinal  construct  which integrates  shorter chains that the Buddha
elaborated on different occasions)(8)  are traditionally understood as
follows.


The  presupposition   of  the  whole  process  is  (1)  ignorance   or
ignore-ance, because something about experience  is overlooked  in our
usual eagerness  to gratify desires.  Due to this ignorance, the other
factors function, including (2) volitional  tendencies  (the fourth of
the skandhas) from a person's previous lifetime which survive physical
death  and  tend  to cause  a new birth.  The original  Sanskrit  term
samskarah refers to the influence that previous mental activities have
on our conative acts.  The persistence  of these volitional tendencies
explains  how rebirth  occurs without a permanent  self: the samskarah
survive physical death to affect the new (3) consciousness that arises
when a fertilized  egg is conceived.  Conception causes (4) mind-body,
the fetus, to grow, which develops (5) the sense-  organs, which allow
(6) contact between each organ and its respective sense-object, giving
rise to (7) sensation  that leads  to (8) craving  for that sensation.
Craving  causes (9) grasping  or attachment  to life in general.  Such
clinging  is traditionally  classified  into four  types: clinging  to
pleasure, to views, to morality or external observances, and to belief
in a soul or self.  This classification is striking because it ignores
any difference  in kind between  physical  sense  grasping  and mental
attachment;  evidently the same problematic  tendency manifests in all
four.  Grasping  leads  to (10) becoming, the tendency  after physical
death  to be reborn, causing  (11) another  birth  and therefore  (12)
"decay  and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair."  And
so the cycle continues.

The first factor  mentioned, ignorance, is not understood  as a "first
cause" that initiated the whole process in some distant past.  Each of
the  twelve  factors  conditions  all  the  others, and  there  is  no
reference  in Buddhism  to some pristine  time before this cycle began
operating. Even (8) craving, which the second Noble Truth gives as the
cause  of duhkha, is here explained  as conditioned  by (7) sensation,
which in turn is conditioned by (6) contact, and so forth.


                                169


In  response  to the  problem  of how  rebirth  can  occur  without  a
permanent  soul  or self  that  is reborn, rebirth  is explained  as a
series of impersonal  processes  which occur without  any self that is
doing or experiencing them.  In one Pali sutra, a monk asks the Buddha
to  whom  belong, and  for  whom  occur, the  phenomena  described  in
pratitya-  samutpada.  The Buddha rejects that question  as misguided;
from each factor as its preconditions  arises another factor;  that is
all.  The karmic results of action are experienced without their being
anyone  who  created  the karma  or anyone  who  receives  its  fruit,
although  there  is a causal  connection  between  the action  and its
result.

A chain is only as strong  as its weakest  link, which  points  to the
Buddhist  solution  to this cycle  of suffering.  "Through  the entire
fading  away  and extinction  of this ignorance  [the  first  factor],
however, the samskarah  [the second factor]  become  extinguished", an
extincti on which in turn affects the third factor, and so forth until
all twelve  factors  have been extinguished.  "Thus  takes  place  the
extinction  of this whole  mass of suffering."  This  formulation  has
encouraged  many Buddhist  as well  as most  Western  commentators  to
understand Buddhism as nihilistic, yet Sakyamuni Buddha himself denied
this, for it misunderstands  the significance  of the fact that  there
has never been any self to be annihilated.

This exposition  of basic  doctrines  may seem  a digression  from our
earlier  discussions  of lack and the return  of the repressed.  It is
necessary  to keep  in mind, therefore, the  connection  between  such
theoretical  constructs  and the praxis  they  underpin.  All Buddhist
doctrines  may be viewed as heuristic, because  they all refer back to
the essential  matter of resolving  our duhkha.  We need to understand
how the chain that leads to duhkha functions  in order to learn how to
end  it.   We  must  realize  how  certain,  largely  automatized  and
unconscious, ways of understanding  ourselves  in the world perpetuate
both our sense-of-self and the objectified world we find ourselves in;
and that what has thereby been constructed may also be deconstructed.

From this point of view, the important  issue is not whether  the five
skandhas  are the only synchronous  way to analyze  the sense-of-self,
nor whether the Buddhist doctrines of karma and rebirth are valid, but
the integral  connection  between duhkha and the sense-of-  self.  Our
discussion  of that  relationship  is not  yet  complete, because  the
Buddhist understanding  of pratitya-samutpada  changed radically  with
the   development   of   Mahayana.   Nagarjuna's   interpretation   of
pratitya-samutpada   constituted  a  "Copernican  revolution"   within
Buddhism, and  the  locus  classicus  of this  revolution  is  in  his
Mulamadhyamikakarikas (hereafter "MMK," Candrakirti, 1979). Let us see
what the MMK says about sunyata and nirvana.


                                170


The first  verse of the MMK proclaims  its thoroughgoing  critique  of
being: "No things whatsoever exist, at any time or place, having risen
by themselves, from another, from both or without cause."  Paralleling
the poststructuralist  radicalization  of structuralist  claims  about
language, Nagarjuna's  argument  merely  brings  out  more  fully  the
implications  of pratitya-samutpada.  Dependent  origination  is not a
doctrine  about causal relations  between entities, because the mutual
interdependence  of these  twelve  factors  means  they are not really
entities.  None of the twelve  phenomena  --  which are understood  to
encompass everything -- is self-existent because each is infected with
the traces of all the others.  That none self-exists is the meaning of
sunya  and its substantive  sunyata, terms  notoriously  difficult  to
translate  but usually rendered as "empty" and "emptiness".  Nagarjuna
was careful to warn that sunyata is a heuristic concept: "Sunyata is a
guiding, not  a cognitive, notion, presupposing  the everyday."  (MMK,
XXIV:18) It presupposes  the everyday  because it is parasitic  on the
notion  of things, which it refutes, thereby  refuting  itself  at the
same time. Nagarjuna warned that sunyata was a snake which, if grasped
at the  wrong  end, could  be fatal: "The  spiritual  conquerors  have
proclaimed  sunyata  to be the exhaustion  of all theories  and views;
those  for  whom  sunyata  is  itself  a theory  they  declared  to be
incurable." (MMK XXIV:11).

The point of sunyata is to deconstruct  the self-existence  of things.
Nagarjuna  addresses  the main philosophical  theories of his day, yet
his real target is that unconscious, automatized metaphysics disguised
as the world we live in.  If philosophy were merely a preoccupation of
academics  one could  ignore  it, but we have no choice  in the matter
because  we  are  all  philosophers.  The  fundamental  categories  of
everydayness  for  us  are  self-existing/self-present   things  which
originate, change, and eventually cease to be; in order to explain the
relations  among  these  things, the  categories  of  space, time  and
causality must also be employed.  The most important and problematical
of these supposedly self-existing  things is, of course, the self: the
Buddhist  notion  of interdependent  factors  is thus diametri-  cally
opposed  to the  Cartesian  notion  of  an autonomous, self-  grounded
consciousness.  And  the  vehicle  of  this  commonsense  metaphysics,
creating and sustaining  it, is language, which presents us with a set
of  nouns  (self-existing   things)  that  have  temporal  and  causal
predicates (arise, change and cease).

Can  our  duhkha  be  explained  in  terms  of sunyata  and  pratitya-
samutpada? The ego-self is delusive because, like everything  else, it
is a temporary manifestation arising out of the interconditionality of
the twelve factors, yet it feels separate from that chain and from the
rest  of the world.  The basic  difficulty  is that insofar  as I feel
separate  (i.e., an  autonomous, self-existing  consciousness)  I also
feel  uncomfortable, because  an illusory  sense  of  separateness  is
inevitably insecure. It is the ineluctable trace of nothingness in my


                                171


"empty"  (because  not really  self-existing)  sense-of-self  that  is
experienced as a sense-of-lack; in reaction, the sense-of-self becomes
preoccupied  with  trying  to make  itself  self-  existing, in one or
another symbolic fashion. The tragic irony is that the ways we attempt
to do this cannot  succeed, for a sense-of-self  can never  expel  the
trace of lack that constitutes it insofar as it is illusory;  while in
the most important  sense  we are already  self-existing, because  the
infinite set of differential traces that constitutes each of us is the
whole universe.  "The self-existence of a Buddha is the self-existence
of this very cosmos. The Buddha is without a self-existent nature; the
cosmos  too is without  a self-existent  nature."  (MMK  XXII:16) What
Nagarjuna  says here about the Buddha  is equally  true for each of us
and, indeed, everything;  the only difference  is that a Buddha  knows
it.

Yet  insofar  as we strive  to become  a Buddha, we misunderstand  the
Buddha's   teaching.   Instead,  the   serenity   we   seek   is  "the
coming-to-rest  of all  ways  of taking  things, the  repose  of named
things" (sarvopalambhopasamaprapancopasamah). (MMK XXV:24) Nagarjuna's
most important commentator  Candrakirti  glosses this verse: "the very
coming  to rest, the non-functioning, of perceptions  as signs  of all
named  things, is itself  nirvana....  When verbal  assertions  cease,
named things are in repose;  and the ceasing to function of discursive
thought is ultimate serenity."(Candrakirti, 1979, p.262).  The problem
is not merely that language acts as a filter, obscuring  the nature of
things.  Rather, names  are used to objectify  appear  ances  into the
self- existing things we perceive as books, tables, trees, you and me.
In other words, the objective world of material things, which interact
causally in space and time, is metaphysical through-and-through. It is
this  metaphysics  that most needs  to be deconstructed, according  to
Buddhism, because  this  is the metaphysics, disguised  as commonsense
reality, which  makes  me suffer, especially  insofar  as I understand
myself  to  be  one  such  self-existing   being  in  time  that  will
nonetheless die.

It is possible  to end our duhkha because the coming-to-rest  of using
names to take perceptions as self-existing objects can deconstruct the
automatized inside-outside  dualism between our sense-of-self  and the
"objective"  everyday  world.  Since that world is as differential, as
full  of  traces, as  the  textual  discourse  Derrida  analyzes,  the
Buddhist approach is to use those differences/deferrals to deconstruct
that objectified world --  including ourselves, since we sub-jects are
the first to be ob-jectified. If there are only traces of traces, what
happens  if  we  stop  trying  to arrest  those  elusive  traces  into
self-present things? "When there is clinging perception (upadane), the
perceiver  generates  being.  When there is no clinging perception, he
will be freed and there will be no being." (MMK XXVI:7)

This explains how Buddhist doctrine deconstructs the self-existence of
things, but this is not sufficient for understanding how that


                                172

deconstructs  our sense-of-lack.  The last section  will address  that
deconstruction  by considering how the most fundamental dualism of all
--that  between  my ungrounded  sense  of being  and  the nonbeing  or
no-thing-ness that threatens it--may be conflated.

Letting the mind come forth.

By now it has become  clear  that, from the Buddhist  perspective, our
most problematic  duality  is not life against  death  but self versus
nonself, or our being  versus  nonbeing.  In psychological  terms, our
primal repression is not fear of death -- which still holds the feared
thing  at arm's length  by projecting  it into the future  --  but the
sense-of-self repressing its suspected nothingness right now, which, I
have argued, we become  aware of as a sense-of-lack  that shadows  our
sense-of-self.   This  particular   bipolarity  infects  much  of  our
thinking.  A good example is Paul Tillich's  The Courage to Be.(1952).
According  to  Tillich, ontological  anxiety  is anxiety  about  one's
ultimate  non-being, about not being able to preserve one's own being.
Since he believes  this anxiety  cannot be eliminated, his theological
solution  is for us to be accepted  by the Power of Being, which gives
us the courage to affirm being despite the threat of nonbeing.  God is
"the  self-affirmation   of  Being  itself   which  prevails   against
nonbeing."

Perhaps  it is reassuring  to learn  that  God is not  on the side  of
nonbeing --  which is presumably  why nonbeing does not rate a capital
--  but the Buddhist  approach  is different: as the 7th century Ch'an
master  Hsuan  Chueh  of Yung Chia put it, "Being  is not being.  Non-
being is not non-being.  Miss this rule by a hair and you are off by a
thousand miles." Such conceptual  paradoxes may not seem very relevant
to our lives, yet the speculations  of theologians  and metaphysicians
are only the most abstract  version of a game which touches  our core,
if the basic issue turns out to be the groundedness  or groundlessness
of that core.  Like  the matter  and anti-matter  of quantum  physics,
nonbeing  (experienced  as lack) turns  out to be the shadow  of being
(self).  They arise together, in relation to each other, and therefore
they should be able to disappear together by collapsing back into each
other --  which cannot leave the nothingness we dread (for that is one
of the two poles) but... what?

In the Samyutta  Nikaya Sakyamuni  declares that "the world is nothing
in itself and for itself,....  therefore  it is said that the world is
nothing."  What is this nothing? He says that it is the six organs  of
eye, ear, nose, tongue, body  and  mind, their  six sense-objects, and
the six corresponding  types  of sense-consciousness.  Yet the  Buddha
also describes  these same eighteen indriyas as the all: "Whosoever, O
monks, should say: 'Reject this all, I will proclaim


                                173


another all' --  it would be mere talk on his part...  Why so? Because
it is beyond his scope to do so." The Buddha then provides "a teaching
for  the  abandonment  of  the  all":  "The  eye  must  be  abandoned,
visual-objects   must  be  abandoned,  eye-   consciousness   must  be
abandoned, eye-contact must be abandoned.  That enjoyment or suffering
or neutral  state experienced  which arises  arises  according  to eye
contact  --  that also  must be abandoned."  And so forth  for all the
other senses.(Samyutta  Nikaya XXXV,23-26).  Since the Buddha has just
said  that  these  eighteen  indriyas  encompass  everything,  such  a
teaching  seems odd: there is nothing else to become, nowhere  else to
turn. The solution is so obvious that we are liable to overlook it: it
is simply to realize something about the sunya "empty" nature of these
phenomena, an approach that Mahayana developed.


As  in  psychotherapy,  the  Buddhist  response  to  bipolar  dualisms
involves recognizing  the side that has been denied.  If death is what
the sense-of-self fears, the solution is for the sense-of-self to die.
If it is no-thing-ness  (i.e., the  repressed  intuition  that, rather
than being autonomous and self-existent, the "I" is a construct)  I am
afraid of, the best way to resolve that fear is to become nothing. The
12th century Japanese Zen master Dogen sums up this process:

    To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is
    to forget  the self.  To forget  the self  is to be actualized  by
    myriad  things.  When actualized  by myriad  things, your body and
    mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace
    of   realization    remains,   and   this    no-trace    continues
    endlessly.(Dogen, in Tanzhashi, 1985,p.70).


"Forgetting"  ourselves  is how we lose  our sense  of separation  and
realize that we are not other than the world.  Meditation  is learning
how to become nothing  by learning  to forget the sense-of-self, which
happens  when I become  absorbed  into my meditation-exercise.  If the
sense-of-self  is a result of consciousness attempting to reflect back
upon itself in order to grasp itself, such meditation  practice  makes
sense as an exercise in de-reflection.  Consciousness  unlearns trying
to  grasp  itself, real-ize  itself, objectify  itself.  Enlightenment
occurs  in  Buddhism  when  the  usually-automatized   reflexivity  of
consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling
into the void and being  wiped  out of existence.  "Men are afraid  to
forget their minds, fearing  to fall through  the Void with nothing to
stay their  fall.  They do not know that the Void is not really  void,
but the realm  of the real  Dharma."  (Huang-po,in Blofeld, 1958,p.41)
The n, when I no longer strive to make myself  real through  things, I
find myself  "actualized"  by them, says Dogen.  This process  implies
that what we fear as nothingness  is not really  nothingness, for that
is the perspective of a sense-of-self anxious about losing its grip on
itself. According to Buddhism,


                                174




letting-go  of myself  and merging  with that no-thing-ness  leads  to
something else: when consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail,
I become  no-thing, and  discover  that  I am everything  --  or, more
precisely, that I can be anything.

An example of Zen meditation  may be helpful here.  In the Zen lineage
that I am familiar  with, a first  koan such as Joshu's  Mu is treated
more or less like a mantram.  Putting  all one's  mental  energy  into
"muuu..." (repeated mentally during breath exhalations) undermines the
sense-of-self  by letting-go of the mental processes which sustain it.
At the  beginning  of such  practice, one attempts  to concentrate  on
"muuu..."  but  is distracted  by other  thoughts, feelings, memories,
desires, etc., that arise.  A later, more focussed  stage  is when one
can concentrate  on "muuu..." without losing it: "muuu..." effectively
keeps  other thoughts, etc., away.  The stage  when "both  inside  and
outside naturally fuse" occurs when there is no longer the sense of an
"I" that is repeating an objective sound; there is only "muuu..." This
stage is sometimes  described  by saying  that now "muuu..."  is doing
"muuu...": it is "muuu..." that sits, walks, eats, and so forth.



Sometimes  this practice leads to a condition  that has been described
as hanging  over  a precipice.  "Except  for  occasional  feelings  of
uneasiness  and despair, it is like death itself."  (Hakuin,in Suzuki,
1956, p.148)  The  solution  is  to  throw  oneself  completely   into
"muuu...":

      Bravely let go on the edge of the cliff.
      Throw yourself into the abyss with decision and courage.
      You only revive after death! (Po-shan,in Chang,1959).

At this point  the teacher  may help  by cutting  the last  thread: an
unexpected  action, such as a blow or shout or even a few quiet words,
may startle the student into letting-go. "All of a sudden he finds his
mind and body wiped out of existence, together with the koan.  This is
what is known as 'letting go your hold.'" ( HakuinSuzuki, 1956, p.148)
(11).  One classical Zen story tells how a student was enlightened  by
the sound of a pebble striking bamboo.  When the practice is ripe, the
shock of an unexpected  sensation can help it to penetrate to the very
core of one's illusory  sense of being  --  that is, it is experienced
nondually.


Is this being or nothingness? groundlessness  or groundedness? If each
link of pratitya-samutpada  is conditioned  by all the others, then to
become completely  groundless  is also to become completely  grounded,
not  in some  particular, but in the whole  network  of interdependent
relations that constitutes the world. The supreme irony of my struggle
to  ground  myself  is that  it cannot  succeed  because  I am already
grounded in the totality. Buddhism implies


                                175


that I am groundless  and ungroundable  insofar as delusively  feeling
myself  to be separate  from  the  world;  I have  always  been  fully
grounded  insofar  as I am the world  and the world  is me.  With that
conflation, the no-thing at my core is transformed  from sense-of-lack
into a serenity  that is imperturbable  because nothing is there to be
perturbed.   "When  neither  existence  nor  non-existence   again  is
presented   to  the  mind,  then,  through   the  lack  of  any  other
possibility,  that  which  is  without   support  becomes   tranquil."
(Santideva)(12)


How does  this solve  the problem  of desire, our alternation  between
frustration  and boredom? A consciousness  that seeks to ground itself
by fixating  on something  dooms itself to perpetual  dissatisfaction,
for the impermanence  of all things  means no such perch can be found.
But since it is our lack that compels us to seek such a perch, the end
of lack allows  a change of perspective.  The solution  is a different
way of experiencing  the problem: in Hegelian terms, the "free-ranging
variable" which always has some finite determination  but is not bound
to any particular  one.  The bad infinite of lack transforms  into the
good infinite  of a variable  that needs nothing.  In Buddhist  terms,
this transforms  the alienation  of a reflexive  sense-of-self  always
trying to fixate itself into the freedom  of an "empty"  mind that can
become anything because it does not need to become something.



The Astahasrika  Prajnaparamita  Sutra begins by describing this "good
infinity":

    No wisdom can we get hold  of,  no  highest  perfection,
    No Bodhisattva, no thought of enlightenment  either.  When told of
    this, if  not  bewildered  and  in no  way  anxious, A Bodhisattva
    courses  in  the  Tathagata's  wisdom.
    In  form, in feeling, will, perception  and  awareness  [the  five
    skandhas]
    Nowhere in them they find a place to rest on.  Without a home they
    wander, dharmas never hold them,
    Nor do they grasp at them.(Conze, 1973, 1:5-7,p.9)

For  Buddhism  the  problem  of desire  is  solved  when, without  the
craving-for-being that compels me to take hold of something and try to
settle down in it, I am free to become it.  The Buddhist  solu tion to
the problem of life is thus very simple: the "bong!" of a temple bell,
the  "tock!" of  pebble  against  bamboo, the  flowers  on  a tree  in
springtime, to cite some Zen examples.  Of course, becoming  an object
is precisely  what we have been trying to do all along, yet in a self-
defeating  way, compulsively  seizing  on our own objectifications  in
order  to  stabilize  ourselves.  But  I cannot  become  something  by
grasping  at  it.   That  merely  reinforces  the  delusive  sense  of
separation between that-which-is-grasped and that-which- grasps-at-it.
The only  way I can become  a phenomenon  is to realize  I have always
been it, according to Buddhism. When nothing is needed


                                176


from the object  to fill up my lack, it can be just what it is --  the
reverberating  temple  bell, etc., now no longer  frustrating  because
there is no longer anything lacking in me that I need to experience as
something lacking in my world.

If I am the object, however, it no longer makes sense to understand it
as an object. When there is no sense-of-self that is inside, there can
be no outside.  In the "Sokushinzebutsu"  fascicle  of the Shobogenzo,
Dogen quotes the Chinese  Ch'an master  Yang-shan: mind is "mountains,
rivers, earth, the sun, the moon and the stars." This mind is not some
transcendental  Absolute.  It is nothing  other  than your mind and my
mind, when it is realized  to be a free-ranging  variable not bound to
any particular determination. Such a mind is ab-solute in the original
sense of the term, unconditioned.  Meditative  techniques  decondition
the mind from its tendency  to secure  itself by circling  in familiar
ruts, thus enabling its freedom to become anything.  The most-  quoted
line from the best-known  of all Mahayana  sutras, the Diamond  Sutra,
encapsulates all this in one phrase: "Let your mind come forth without
fixing it anywhere."(13)

Conclusion

We have seen how Buddhism  anticipated  the reluctant  conclusions  of
modern  psychology:  guilt  and  anxiety  are  not  adventitious   but
intrinsic to the ego.  According to my interpretation of Buddhism, our
dissatisfaction   with  life  derives  from  a  repression  even  more
immediate than death- terror: the suspicion that "I" am not real.  The
sense-of-self  is not self-existing  but a mental  construction  which
experiences its own groundlessness  as a lack.  This sense-of-lack  is
consistent  with what psychotherapy  has discovered  about ontological
guilt  and  basic  anxiety.   We  usually   cope  with  this  lack  by
objectifying it in various ways and try to resolve it through projects
which  cannot  succeed  because  they  do not address  the fundamental
issue.

So our most  problematic  dualism  is not  life  fearing  death  but a
fragile sense-of-self  dreading  its own groundlessness.  By accepting
and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always
been grounded, not as a self-contained  being but as one manifestation
of a web of relationships  which encompasses  everything.  This solves
the problem of desire by transforming it.  As long as we are driven by
lack, every desire becomes a sticky attachment that tries to fill up a
bottomless pit. Without lack, the serenity of our no-thing-ness, i.e.,
the  absence  of  any  fixed  nature, grants  the  freedom  to  become
anything.


                                177

1.In The New York Review of Books, 16 July 1992.

2.For  Becker,  facing  the  truth  of  the  human  condition  without
psychological  defenses  leads to mental paralysis, partial (neurosis)
or severe (psychosis);  yet to hide from this fact is to find security
in a world of projections  and transferences  (Becker, 1973, chs.  2-4
and passim).

3."'Sin'...constituted the greatest event in the entire history of the
sick  soul,  the  most  dangerous  sleight-of-hand  of  the  religious
interpretation" (Nietzsche, 1956,p.277).

4.Existential  Psychotherapy 221-2.  Yet Yalom cites some evidence for
it. For example, Adah Maurer and Max Stern concluded that the child is
terrified of nothingness; according to Maurer, the infant's first task
is to differentiate between self(being) and environment(nonbeing), and
during  a night terror the infant  may be experiencing  "awareness  of
nonbeing"(p.89).

5.Without   such   a   psychoanalytic    understanding,   sociological
explanations   like  Hannah  Arendt's  "the  banality   of  evil"  are
incomplete.  (See here Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
of Evil [New York: Viking, 1964], p.276 and passim.)

6.A similar realization-that the ego not only represses, but represses
the fact that  it represses-was  a turning  point  in Freud's  career,
redirecting his investigations from the nature of the repressed to the
nature of repressing.

7.For an example  of how our socially-agreed  and apparently-objective
temporal  schema can be deconstructed  back into an enternal  now, see
Loy, D., "What's  Wrong  with Being and Time: A Buddhist  Critique  of
Heidegger," Time and Society (1992), vol. 1 no. 2.

8.For a scholarly examination of prativtya-samutpada in early Buddhist
literature, see  Govind  Chandra  Pande, Studies  in  the  Origins  of
Buddhism  (Delhi: Motilal  Banarsida, 2nd ed., 1983), 407-42.  " Apart
from the central  idea...  the formula  has grown through  accretions,
fusions, and analyses.  In its full  grown  form, consequently, it has
about   it  an  aura  of  vagueness,  and  in  the  details,  even  of
inconsistency"(441).

9.The translation used in this paper is Mervyn Sprung's in his edition
of Lucid  Exposition  of the Middle  Way  (Boulder, CO: Prajna  Press,
1979), Candrakirti's  classic  commentary  on the MMK.  Mervyn  Sprung
translates sunyata as "the absence of being in thins."

10.For Derrida's  textual deconstruction, see, e.g., Positions  (1981)
and Margins  of Philosophy  (1982), both  published  by University  of
Chicago Press.

11.For more on this process, see Yasutani-Roshi's  "Commentary  on the
Koan  Mu"  in  P.  Kapleau, ed., The  Three  Pillars  of  Zen  (Tokyo:
Weatherhill, 1966), 71-82.

12.Bodhicaryavatara  9:35.  Cf.  MMK VII.16: "Anything which exists by
virtue of dependent origination is quiescence in itself."

13.For more on the Buddhist  approach to repression  and the reture of
the  repressed, see  Loy, D.  "The  Nonduality  of Life  and  Death: A
Buddhist View of Repression," Philosophy East and West, 40 no.2 (April
1990), and Loy, D. "Trying to Become Real: A Buddhist Critique of Some
Secular Heresies,"International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.32,no. 4,
December 1992.  Regarding subject/object nonduality, see Nonduality: A
Study in Comparative  Philosophy  (New Haven;  Yale University  Press,
1988).

                                178


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