Emptiness of Self

And life proves to be good, yet again, revealing all my woes to be attributable to my own silly neuroses and overanalysis of nearly everything. I have been reading "thoughts without a thinker" by Mark Epstein, a psychotherapist and Buddhist who incorporates Buddhist philosophy with the western notion of psychotherapy. I will try and be brief in summarizing the gist of the book. So far, he has argued that Freud's ideas of the self which exists deep beneath layers of childhood and relationships with parents are oddly similar to Buddhism's Wheel of Life used to teach about the concept of karma, "the notion that a person's actions in this life will affect the kind of rebirth he or she will take in the next." I don't necessarily believe in reincarnation and neither does Epstein. However, he uses the teachings of each realm in the Wheel of Life to explain a different aspect of psychotherapy, viewing the Wheel as more a categorization of psychological realms, "points of self-estrangement" he calls them, where we experience ourselves through our reactions to different things we find lacking in our sense of identity. The part that is echoing to me throughout today and this past week is the Buddha's idea of self as empty. If the self is empty, then we do not experience the tensions based on what we lack or what we cling to as images representing the self. I have learned that the act of defining oneself and attaching labels decreases the capacity for change and adaptation by requiring that if one makes a statement or opinion or even encounters something which clashes with these labels, the mind is confused and must accommodate for the change. If these labels do not exist, the self does not need to accommodate or overanalyze the process. It is found that a person who understands the "emptiness of self" is very similar to what Westerners expect in a person with a highly developed sense of self. The search for self is not regressive nor is it a manifestation of a true (buried) self, says Epstein, but rather a "crumbling of the false self" through "awareness of its manifestations" without sensing a need to create new ones, a very relieving experience indeed. I found myself saying in the shower something along the lines of, "I am not ashamed of who I am, I am not ashamed of my opinions, interests and desires which are free to change. I am not ashamed of me." This type of statement may be a no brainer to some people, but for me it has not always been.

And that is why I find life good, because everytime I step out of my brain, I see how good it can be and how the psychological realms of the Wheel of Life can reduce us to neurotic, narcissistic, jealous, greedy and grasping personalities, heavily burdened with varying images of the self.