The Trauma of Everyday Life

he motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”
    This spontaneous bit of wisdom struck me deeply and has stayed with me over the years. I often refer to it when teaching. Ajahn Chah was capturing the Buddhist insight into the impermanence of things but not falling into the abyss of negating them utterly. He was giving another version of the Fire Sermon where everything is broken but everything is also dear. What was he referring to exactly? The glass, the body, this life, the self? The implication seemed clear enough: The self, like the glass, doesn’t exist in the way we imagine it—it doesn’t exist in the way we wish it did. But by acknowledging this reality up front, Ajahn Chah was modeling a different way of relating.
    We could use, appreciate, value, and respect the glass without expecting it to last. In fact, we could use it more freely, with more abandon and more care, once we understood that it lacked what Buddhists call inherent existence. The glass, like the self, does not lose its value when we understand that it is on fire.
    Speaking in the vernacular of his own time and place, and going completely against the norm, the Buddha systematically took apart all conventional notions of permanence. He insisted that there was no eternal essence in a human being, for example, no spirit that was one with God, no immortal soul that survives death, and no sacred fire that must be tended. Even consciousness cannot be shown to exist independently, he claimed. Nothing exists in its own right or under its own power. We emerge, as infants, from a relational matrix and then struggle to come to terms with the trauma of aloneness. While all things remain contingent, relative, and relational, our object-seeking instincts desire a security we assume is our birthright. As a patient of mine, Carl, once ruefully said, in describing how tenaciously he could cling to unavailable women who were turned off by his neediness, “I’m scared to lose what I don’t have.” The Buddha said much the same thing about the rest of us. We cling to a notion of permanence that, according to Buddha, never existed in the first place. We cling to a glass that is already broken.
    Many people suffer because of failures in their infancies, failure to be made sufficiently secure in the illusion of their centrality, failure to have a taste of boundless support 14 from their parental environments. Such people, when they dig down to their core, find feelings of absence, feelings of lack, feelings of impotence or rage where once there might have been omnipotence. Others suffer because of failures in the disillusioning process itself—as adults they clamor for attention from their loved ones, expecting these people to be as selfless as their mothers once were, and they become punitive when they do not get their way. They insist on always being the center of attention and find it difficult to connect empathically with others. Their perpetual feeling of disillusion is evidence of their failure to be disillusioned. Still others manage to weather the travails of early childhood, of illusion and disillusion. But many of these people, despite the relative ease of their childhoods, nevertheless come to feel like my patient Monica, nostalgic for the glow of her mother’s love while uncomfortably alone and adrift in what seems a hostile universe.
    The incessant movement of the world does not have to intimidate us, the Buddha proclaimed in his Fire Sermon. We are all part of it, even if our notions of self-help suggest that we should be able to rise above it. Shinnying up the masts of our selves in order to escape from the pain all around us, we succeed only in reinforcing our not-so-secret feelings of dread. Alone at the top of the mast, we remain entangled in our tangles, burning with the three fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. The Buddha had something else in mind for us, something that Western therapists have also begun to figure out. Look closely at this world, he suggested. Examine it carefully. Probe your