The Psychology Of Awakening by Stephen Batchelor and Guy Claxton Gay Watson

Author:Stephen Batchelor and Guy Claxton Gay Watson [Gay Watson, Stephen Batchelor and Guy Claxton]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2012-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

When we speak of the self from the perspective of Western psychology we are most often taken with the beauty of inflection, with the self’s whistle as it appears. But when we look at the self from the perspective of the Buddhist psychologies, we emphasise the beauty of the self’s innuendo, of the space around the self.

So perhaps my juggling breakthrough was the equivalent of hearing the blackbird’s whistle ‘just after’. I did not need to leave my ego behind, merely to see around its edges. My shoulder tension and my reliance on my thinking mind were symptoms of a defensive reliance on only one aspect of my nature: a holding on to the reactive self ‘as it appears’. While juggling, as sometimes happens in meditation, my perspective had been broadened. I had permitted a loosening that was neither transcendent nor regressive but that had allowed me to see in three dimensions instead of in two. I had glimpsed my ego’s inherent unreality, or rather, I had permitted myself to simply be, without worrying about keeping myself together.

Only in the musings of the British child analyst D.W. Winnicott have I found an approach to these kinds of experiences that dovetails with a Buddhist understanding. ‘In thinking of the psychology of mysticism, it is usual to concentrate on the understanding of the mystic’s withdrawal into a personal inner world . . .’ wrote Winnicott. ‘Perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the mystic’s retreat to a position in which he can communicate secretly with subjective . . . phenomena, the loss of contact with the world of shared reality being counterbalanced by a gain in terms of feeling real.’3

When Winnicott wrote of the mystical experience he was alluding to a mode of being that he described over and over again in his work. Opposing such a state to one of either ego integration or disintegration, Winnicott wrote instead of the experiences of unintegration or letting go. By unintegrated Winnicott meant something like what I had stumbled upon in my juggling where the usual needs for control are suspended and where the self can unwind. He meant losing oneself without feeling lost, hearing the self’s innuendo rather than just its inflection. ‘The opposite of integration would seem to be disintegration,’ commented Winnicott. ‘That is only partly true. The opposite, initially, requires a word like unintegration. Relaxation for an infant means not feeling a need to integrate, the mother’s ego-supportive function being taken for granted.’4 His conclusion that these experiences are necessary for ‘feeling real’ is borne out by many of our own meditative experiences. It is most common, I think, for meditation to rather inexplicably promote this capacity, at the same time as it undercuts the reality of the self.

It is the mother’s function, in Winnicott’s view, to create an environment for her baby in which it is safe to be nobody, because it is only out of such a place that the infant can begin to find herself. ‘It is

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