by Lei Wang
I have often scoffed at coping mechanisms. I wanted to be better than them. Freud said the end goal of therapy was to take you from neurotic misery to the ordinary unhappiness, but even in the midst of neurotic misery, I wanted more than the ordinary unhappiness. Ordinariness is not very inspiring. Only the unwell (one extreme of the extraordinary), I thought, aspire to be unremarkable.
Anything that freewheeled with emotions I took to be coping mechanisms: journaling, therapy, personal essays, even heart-centered meditations. And yet I did them all. I liked them, they helped me in some way, but it felt like dating someone embarrassing, like when a friend was seeing someone she was actually quite into but whose uncool earnestness she could not stomach in public, so we secretly nicknamed him Zumba. Zumba is inefficient and not how you REALLY exercise. Zumba is cringe. (I know, I know, the snob part of me is really lovable.)
What I thought I wanted was transcendence, the stuff beyond messy incorrigible human emotions, to live in that place where all is always well, at least subjectively. It’s a very attractive state: who wants to be Eeyore when you can be Pooh? I still believe it’s possible to live this way—it is possible to be enlightened—but I no longer think it’s the best or even better way.
Lately, I’ve been finding that my favorite teachings and teachers are post-enlightenment backtrackers, no longer proselytizing the gospel of nonduality/oneness as the ultimate truth but instead how to live in the world of appearances, including the duality of relationships with other people.
The hugely popular meditation teacher Adyashanti retired from active teaching three years ago, due to chronic pain and other health issues, but the word on the street was that he also wanted to work on his emotions and relationships, because not everything had been magically resolved with this awakening. And what was going on with all the health issues? The body, after all, is not separate from the rest of the system.
Enlightened people can still have all the physical symptoms of panic attacks; to them, it seems to happen only on the level of the body. The fear and distress—what we usually think of as panic—is not there, but the body is still panicking. Enlightened people may still take drugs for anxiety, to calm these physical symptoms. But is panic really just purely physical? What it means to me is that there is something still not quite seen, dissociated from, and the body is telling the truth.
This is not meant to be any sort of exposé. It does not mean so-and-so is or is not awake. I admire it greatly: to be willing to break the idea the world has about you and about enlightenment is the ultimate triumph in not letting the ego have the final say.
I went to a free weekend workshop last Saturday with Scott Kiloby, who described himself as “a calm enlightenment teacher for so many years with a tornado buried.” Now he shows people how to uncover and unwind repressed emotions, through a process called Somatic Inquiry.
You start by being aware of your body and then saying something like, “It is safe for me to express my anger” or “It is safe for me to express hurt.” These are not meant to be affirmations; you are not actually trying to make yourself feel these feelings. Instead, you notice, as you say the words internally, to yourself, how your body reacts. Where does the body tense up, and how much? You can pretend you feel safe all you want, probably do even feel okay in the day-to-day, but the body cannot lie. Whichever statement affects you more—whichever causes more of a sense of contraction—is a sense of where your volcano may lie. (There may certainly be more than one volcano.)
Later on in the session, we said to ourselves the statements, “I don’t need to heal”/“I don’t need to be free.” This is, no doubt, what enlightenment already teaches: that you are already free, already whole, just as you are. Therapy won’t take you there. You can’t perfect it. But of course that is not how I approached it, so when I said those statements, my body felt how I had lied. I pretended I did not really need to heal, everything’s okay as it is, blah blah, while I kept desperately just trying to feel better. I still could not just be here. Because needing to be free is actually an escape, taking me away from here, here being too distressing: the now infamous spiritual bypassing.
And yet both “I need to heal” and “I don’t need to heal” are true. There are a plethora of issues I have to heal, certainly. But I also need to heal my sense of needing to heal. But I can only heal that via not feeling like I need to heal. By the Indian logic of the tetralemma, this is perfectly coherent:
I need to heal
I don’t need to heal
I both need to heal and don’t need to heal
I neither need to heal nor don’t need to heal
Buddhist logic adds an extra step: I am. As in:
I am safe, I am not safe, I am both safe and not safe, I am neither safe nor not safe, etc…
I am
Which takes us back to nonduality. There is no contradiction in the stage of isness: “I am _______” includes anything you can be. I am the space where all volcanoes and tornadoes reside. Isness has not decided upon anything, or identified with anything. I just am.
But just as the usual persnickety mind has a gravity to negativity and problems that takes us away from the underlying fineness of our lives, enlightened awareness can have a gravity to peace that takes away from paying attention to the tornadoes. This is why I’m not surprised at the pernicious scandals of spiritual teachers.
Theory of mind is such a Goldlilocks problem. Too much of it and one can be paralyzed by social anxiety, caring too much about the thoughts of others. Too little and you have potentially autism. It is the hell of other people and it is also how compassion exists. I’ve often wondered why compassion needed to be tacked on to the ends of meditation practices: wouldn’t a practice of oneness naturally lead to a heartful consideredness of all beings? But apparently not! Enlightenment without compassion is a very abstract unity.
If the problems of too much theory of mind is too much awareness of both self and others, then the boon of less of it is certainly a healthier less self-consciousness but where is the line on the spectrum between that and lack of self-awareness? “Don’t you find it strange?” someone once told me, “that around enlightened gurus there often is that one person who is very, very neurotic?” That person often takes care of logistics, but also seems to just hang around the guru—in a way, they serve as the guru’s outsourced anxiety, someone who is still so hyper-aware of others that they could make up for some of the guru’s blind spots. These are very broad strokes.
Up until a few days ago, my book was called Just in Case You Don’t Have to Be Here. My best friend had come up with the title years before, when I had still mainly been advocating for the disappearance of the narrative self, which is different from the creaturely, experiencing self. The story of the self, the self-conscious sayer of hello to oneself, does not always have to be here, at least not in every moment. It was quite laborious trying to explain, and also unrelatable to most people on first contact. We also already have those moments all the time: when we lose ourselves in a good song or a beautiful day or our favorite author or when we are comfortable at home or with our closest friends and not thinking about how we’re failures. (Though often we lose ourselves in worse ways, to our most insidious patterns.)
The title hasn’t felt right for a while now, but I wasn’t sure what else it could be: just in case you’re not who you think you are? Until I was talking to my best friend about it and she casually suggested, “What about Just in Case You Have to Be Here?” The difference of a single word, but it felt immediately less like a lie.
Just in case you have to here, how do you manage to cope? Maybe part of it is meditating into oneness and maybe it’s crying a lot with our friends. Maybe it’s allowing whatever shows up, while being aware, which is the hard thing: to be aware not just of awareness or your breath, but anything at all that appears. Both “you have to be here” and “you don’t have to be here” are true. Just as, for me personally, “I want to be here” and “I don’t want to be here” are true. With this one change, I could feel less like a hypocrite for having negative feelings, or even for wanting to escape. I could hold all of them, which felt like true integrity: rather than a stickler to one way, an integration of all parts.
The self-help genre is famously pointed: do this, not that, even though different books can suggest polar opposite strategies, sometimes even the same author. Neil Strauss wrote The Game about Pick-Up Artistry and became known for it, then followed it up years later with The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, about the costs of that lifestyle. Elizabeth Gilbert said Eat, Pray, Love was the answer; then she came out as a love addict. I think it’s a great success to be able to admit, to a vast audience especially, who expect you to be a certain way, that you’re wrong. And while marketing your certainty and belief that you’ve got it this time, you may very well be wrong again. It’s hard to hold the world in all its glorious nuance, to know the ultimate truth.
Just this morning, I read in The Write Path blog that “the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” This was via the entrepreneur Naval Ravikant, and in an entrepreneurial way, inspiring. But it is also the kind of one-sided hot take blogs are all about (the title of this blog being, “If you’re intelligent and broke, you have an ego problem.”) I believed this for a moment (and also felt bad about myself), and then remembered: there is more at play here than intelligence and whether or not you have the life you want.
There is also chance and nature, grace and circumstances, and to believe you can control everything is just as fundamentalist as to believe it’s all completely up to the Universe. We tend to think of fundamentalism as irrational when applied to religion, but there are fundamentalists about rationalism just the same, or fundamentalists about materialism. Instead of a different kind of logic. Rather than the nondual fundamentalism of ego dissolution, we can have ego dilution: there is just so much more out there than this little dude, so much that you don’t have to get rid of it. And maybe that’s the true peace. Inspiring, too: more, more, more is always more inspiring than less, less, less.
Montaigne, the father of essayists, who famously let it all hang and wrote about farts and other bodily functions in an essayistic form and era that discouraged such personality and irreverence, loved this quote by the Roman playwright Terence so much he engraved it onto the ceiling beam of his study, as constant reminder: “Homo sum, humani nihilism a me alienum puto.” I am human: nothing human is alien to me.
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