by Tang Huyen

"The most vulnerable type is the type of people who block themselves from themselves to protect themselves from themselves... Buddhist cultivation doesn't work for them, because Buddhist cultivation is predicated on honesty to oneself and openness to oneself, and blocking oneself from oneself to protect oneself from oneself is the exact contrary to that."

People who are happy, relaxed, at peace with themselves,
serene don't go nuts when existentially challenged.
The people who go nuts when existentially
challenged tend to be tense, high-strung, defensive,
even if they normally are happy. The happiness of the
former runs deep, that of the latter shallow. There is the
well-known jet-set type who is successful and happy,
but who cannot stop because the moment they stop,
they realise that they have nowhere to go.

The most vulnerable type is the type of people who block
themselves from themselves to protect themselves from
themselves. Buddhist cultivation doesn't work for them,
because Buddhist cultivation is predicated on honesty to
oneself and openness to oneself, and blocking oneself
from oneself to protect oneself from oneself is the exact
contrary to that. Such people fight a constant rearguard
battle against themselves and waste a lot of energy
doing so. They carry a lot of stress and strain with them
just fighting with themselves to protect and defend
themselves against themselves. Something happens, like
a crash, and they're goners, beyond help and beyond
reach. I suspect that they will remain so for the rest of
their lives, however long it is. Had they cultivated
mindfulness, they would have weathered the crash,
contained it and even reemerged better off on the other
side of it for the experience.

In psychoanalysis there is the expression "identification
with the aggressor." Here the aggressor is not a person,
like one's father or mother, but a crash that affects one,
and instead of dealing with it to get over it, one
identifies with it and denies that anything has happened —
and even more strongly that anything bad has happened —
so one in effect identifies with one's aggressor and lets it
wreak havoc on one with abandon, perhaps for the rest of
one's life. Such a course of actions could not have
happened if one had cultivated mindfulness. But
mindfulness is predicated on honesty to oneself and
openness to oneself. It is hard if one can't stand oneself.

To return to the entire issue of Buddhist cultivation
being needed or not, being wanted or not: if one is
at peace with oneself, if one is serene, why would
one need something extra, like Buddhist awakening,
supposing that it is something extra? One can be
deluded about lots of things, but it would be hard
to be deluded regarding one's being at peace with
oneself and one's being serene. It jumps right out.
One would be hard put to lie to oneself about it,
and others won't be fooled. So if one is at peace with
oneself, if one is serene, one is in the best position to
benefit from Buddhism, but would one want to make
any move in that direction? What does it buy one on
top of what one has and is already?

At the other extreme, if one behaves like a loose
cannon in the "skinned alive" mode, probably Buddhism
can't do anything for one. One has to calm down first,
then Buddhism can begin to help. But it will take
decades, perhaps fifty years or more, to calm down from
such a state, and by then one is probably mentally unfit
to do anything in the realm of mental culture, if one is
still alive.

Buddhist cultivation can be serendipitous. One may
work in one direction and growth may happen in
another. But if one does Buddhist cultivation right,
growth will happen, and it may begin by being
restricted to one area — perhaps not the area that one
intentionally works on — but will spread to all areas
of one's psyche across the board. It will gradually
lead to integration and reconnection across the board,
even if one doesn't aim at them, and even if one
doesn't know what they are.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 30 November 2006, in the "Straight or crooked?" thread, in reply to a poster who argued that one must be suffering dukkha to open the door to Buddhism, and that challenging Buddhist practices require the support of a sangha. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A companion post to "Wholeness First" (<[email protected]>), written one week earlier in the same thread. Where "Wholeness First" argues from the positive side — developmental learning requires a healthy baseline — "The Vulnerable Type" argues from the negative: the people most at risk are not the struggling practitioners but the self-blocking ones. The "identification with the aggressor" formulation is original to Tang Huyen and has no precedent in the corpus. The paradox at the close — serene people are the best candidates for Buddhism but the least likely to want it — is the most searching observation in this pair of posts.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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