The Trauma of Everyday Life

being. And it gave shape and history to the fear that had propelled his spiritual search in the first place. He was able to make this fear an object of inquiry instead of something he needed to run away from. In reorienting himself in this way, the Buddha was firmly in line with the psychotherapy tradition of our own time. Accepting the importance of internal feelings, the Buddha opened himself to the mystery of the self. He validated psychological experience and made the psyche, as he had the body, available for subjective exploration.
    As the great contemporary scholar of Buddhism at Oxford, Richard Gombrich, has repeatedly pointed out, people tend to construe the Buddhist concept of no-self or no-soul as “denying a principle of continuity.” 1 Gombrich pulls no punches when addressing this misconception. “That is totally wrong,” he asserts. “The idea that Buddhism denies personal continuity could not be further from the truth.” 2 The Buddha taught that there is no unchanging essence in people or in things, that what we ordinarily take to be objects are, in fact, processes, but he did not deny the sense of individual subjectivity, of interiority, or of personal continuity. In fact, the general thrust of his teachings was to encourage exactly that sense of personal continuity that people mistakenly think he denied, a continuity that derives in good part from the flow of feeling that underlies our lives.
    In the Buddha’s uncovering of the Middle Path lay a profound and fundamental shift in the spiritual approach to pleasure and unpleasure. The dominant spiritual ideology of his time suggested that pleasant feelings were to be shunned 3 and unpleasant feelings cultivated for their purifying effects. The Buddha, who tried his best to emulate this approach, was ultimately urged into a confrontation with this ideology and turned it on its head. He did not swing to the opposite, to the materialist stance that was widespread in his time and remains dominant in ours, where we believe that unpleasant feelings should be avoided and pleasant ones accumulated for their invigorating effects, but he opened up the realm of feelings, in all of their variety, to meditative scrutiny. This led him directly to the third and fourth foundations of mindfulness, to the potential of mind and mental objects as vehicles of meditative examination. Nothing in the psyche needs to be excluded, the Buddha taught. It can all be held in a meditative embrace. In today’s psychodynamic language, we might say that the Buddha discovered the unconscious and put it to use as grist for the spiritual mill.
    The Buddha did not call it the unconscious, however; he simply called it “mind.” The mind has its own capacity for feeling, he deduced, over and above the corporeal dimension of the five traditional senses. His embrace of the mental dimension of pleasure and pain, which involved opening himself to the interior of his psyche—to its memories, dreams, and reflections and to its continuity over time—allowed him to expand the scope of meditation. No longer idealizing the peaceful quiescence of hypnotic tranquility and no longer trying to escape from himself, the Buddha saw that it was possible to “give understanding” not only to the pleasant and painful aspects of mental feeling but to the entirety of personal experience. The mind itself could become an object of mindfulness.
    Just as the Buddha used mindfulness of the body, the first foundation, as a platform for exploring feelings, he used mindfulness of feelings, the second foundation, as a way into the mind. There are various ways of interpreting and describing the third and fourth foundations of mindfulness, the examination of mind and mental objects, but the direction of the Buddha’s approach is clear. As the tendency toward dissociation is countered, first by examination of physical experience and then by an acceptance of the flow of feelings, mental and emotional life becomes more available. Much of the sutra on the fourth foundation of mindfulness, for instance, deals with how to skillfully pay attention to anger, greed, doubt, agitation, and withdrawal, the emotional “hindrances” to mindfulness that come flooding out of the psyche—out of the unconscious—when the first efforts toward mindful awareness are made. Their appearance, while the cause of much frustration, fear, and shame, is actually a positive sign. They are often among the first indications of the