The Trauma of Everyday Life

quoted Rilke as wishing he had the “
courage de luxe
” to face up to “it,” and he went on to describe, in the behaviorist language he was comfortable with, how his anxious patients attempted to describe what “it” was: “What ‘it’ means is described vaguely and indirectly, because the very essence of ‘it’ is bewilderment. ‘It’ is the experience that one’s existing repertoire of categories of perception, thought and feeling—the systems and behavioral patterns that make it possible to organize one’s perceptions and respond meaningfully—no longer suffice, and that one is no longer able to assign meanings, see connections or act functionally; ‘it’ is the experience of disorganization or—to put it in perhaps too extreme terms—irrationality.” 4
    Barendregt’s conclusion was that most obsessive anxieties and fears are reactions to the terrifying intimation of one’s own insubstantiality. The
situation
in which the vision of chaos takes place becomes the focus of the fear rather than the vision itself. So someone like Yasa would become panicked at female sexuality because that was the setting in which his tenuous insight occurred. I might develop obsessive or compulsive rituals around food because my terror was aroused in the context of eating a piece of toast. We dissociate from that which seems unbearable and reorient ourselves around something we can conceive of. As Barendregt described his patients’ predicament, “This ‘it’ situation is so unreal, so absurd, that they desperately try to recover their bearings and find them in fear, which is preferable to the void of ‘it.’ Since their fear is itself a very negative experience, coping mechanisms are developed to channel and rationalize it.” 5
    When the Buddha sat down with Yasa, he helped him avoid this common pitfall. He countered Yasa’s obsessive anxiety and gave him the means to integrate his vision of depersonalization. Much as Sharon had hoped to keep her Burmese teacher, and herself, from the depths of her sadness, Yasa was trying his best to keep the impact of his revelation at bay. Fleeing from his disturbing insight, he came to the Buddha with his bruised ego firmly in the lead. In his repetition of the phrase “It is fearful, it is horrible,” we can see the telltale beginnings of a phobia. The Buddha, however, redirected Yasa, helping him to
see
impermanence, rather than supporting his fear of it. Notice that he did not tell Yasa that sensual pleasure
was
a defilement, as many Buddhists believe; he showed him
the defilement
and the vanity
in sensual pleasure: the way people use sensual pleasure to avoid dealing with the truth of insubstantiality. There is an important difference here, one that is key to the Buddha’s teachings. Pleasure is not the problem, the Buddha taught: Attachment is. While this insight is now enshrined in the practice of mindfulness, it was not an approach that came easily to the Buddha. He had a lot to work out in the process of discovering it.
    In his first forays into homelessness, the Buddha turned away from the preoccupations of family life. Just as Yasa could not help blaming his terrifying vision on his female attendants, the Buddha at first thought householder life to be the problem. Like Yasa, he seems to have had a moment of existential dread when the reality of old age, illness, and death could not be avoided. After leaving his wife and newborn son, he went to the forest to study with the most accomplished therapists, the most adept meditators, of his day and age. There was already a strong and well-established tradition of yoga, meditation, and renunciation in the forests of northern India, and Gotama set out to learn from the acknowledged masters of his time and place, people who had already rejected everyday life, with its emphasis on material acquisitions and sensual pleasure, and held it in contempt. There were essentially two types of practice available to him, one that used yoga and meditation to reach for the sublime and the other that relied on self-punishment to achieve a state of invulnerability. One reached for the infinite sky of the transcendental spirit, while the other sought to tame the restless and boisterous sea of the body and the passions. These two strains of spiritual striving have a long history in South Asia. They predated the Buddha by thousands of years and have survived to this day, long after Buddhism virtually disappeared in India in the