by Tang Huyen

"Buddhism is nothing more than a carefully reasoned-out programme for developmental learning... Resolving the unfinished business all the way and letting it go is awakening; that 'grunge work' process has to be done, and there is no magic to it."

Psychology and psychotherapy in general are built on the
axiom that growth has little to carry around with it
because everything has been resolved, and that stunted,
thwarted growth carries with it what it has not finished —
the unfinished business — and attempts to resolve it by
repeating it time and again until it is resolved. This
repetition, whether merely mental or also acted out in
real life, is out of synch with what happens in the
present and therefore looks irrational to outsiders, but
will not stop until the situation that created it has been
resolved. Mental culture in general carries the
resolution further and dissolves all lingering problems
and conflicts and makes the person whole and of one
single piece, so that he can act in unison and in "total
action", as opposed to acting in scattered, divergent,
even conflicting directions that share no focus — the
syndrome where a person crashes and breaks into parts
that don't know each other and don't recognise each
other's actions: the walking zombie who doesn't know
who he is and what he does.

A few years ago, the Boston Globe reported that
women who had been raped tended to get raped
again at a higher rate than women who had not been
raped, and, being a liberal newspaper that did not
want to blame the victims, did not conclude that
women who had been raped intentionally got raped
again in order to resolve their memories of being raped.
The Globe didn't mention that possibility — an outright
heresy — but simply left it as a puzzle.

On 1999/2/24, Stan Fisher wrote:

"There is very little worthwhile in Buddhism for
people who are basically sane and healthy; only for
the spiritually diseased among us does it have
something to offer. That is why the four Noble
Truths are in the form of diagnosis of and
prescription for a disease. It's just medicine. Once
you're cured, you can comfortably go back to the
religion you came from."

The next day I replied:

"I beg to disagree. I take the reverse direction: the
more wholesome one is to begin with, the more
Buddhism can do for one, and the less wholesome
one is to begin with, the less Buddhism can do for
one. You can look in this newsgroup: there are posters
who claim years and even decades of practice, and
who are not any less stuck-up and volatile than the
average person out there, probably more. If one
is self-aware and mellow to begin with, one can
with the help of Buddhism — or Stoicism — get much
farther along that way. But if one is uptight,
abusive to others and opaque to oneself, heaven
help one, Buddhism can't do much at all. Indeed
they should have stuck with whatever they came
from — at least there is less inauthenticity that way."

One phenomenon that has always struck me is: the rich
get richer, the poor get children. In my rather
restricted outlook on spirituality, the same pattern
has always piqued me. The people who were well
along the way get even farther along the way faster
and faster, as if they were gathering speed, while
those who started out in the back of the pack seem
just stuck there, regardless of what they think to
themselves in the way of progress. Heaven forbid,
they may even lecture others with regard to
practice and to what being a Buddhist consists in,
but have no ability to turn their attention
inward and check up on themselves, honestly,
openly — rather spending the greater part of their
energy blocking themselves from themselves, as if
they were their own worst enemies from whom
they needed to hide at all costs.

On 2000/9/5, Everett Thiele wrote:

"Cultivating samādhi is therefore important to
the activity of paññā. Now it is perfectly
reasonable to talk about centering with regards
to samādhi. In addition, the cultivation of
samādhi depends heavily on the development of
sīla, or morality. Leading a simple, moral life,
has a very beneficial effect on one's meditation.
And in order to do this well, one needs to cultivate
a stable sense of identity as a 'person practicing
sīla', and integrate one's personality. At least in
the beginning.

Buddhist meditation is not to be recommended for
people with 'weak egos' in the psychological sense.
If such people start 'letting go' prematurely they will
be at the mercy of all kinds of psychological forces
which they aren't likely to be able to steer. This
could be one of the reasons why the bhikkhus have
so many and such detailed disciplinary rules. If
some of them have weak mindfulness, they can
always fall back on the identity of 'I am a monk and
must follow this and this rule'. Otherwise they could
suffer a serious breakdown during intensive
meditation.

A 'weak ego' in western psychology would be a
domineering ego in Buddhism, whereas a 'healthy
ego' in psychology would appear much more 'selfless'
from the Buddhist point of view. Therefore
cultivating a healthy ego, in psychological terms, is
also a wholesome activity and perfectly within the
scope of dhamma practice."

I replied:

"I couldn't agree more, Rett. As you say:
'Buddhist meditation is not to be recommended for
people with weak egos in the psychological sense.'

A weak ego, weak ego boundaries, brittle ego
structure, difficulty in differentiating what is inside
and what is outside, etc. are all counterindicated in
Buddhist meditation, including visualisation.
Teachers of meditation should spot the people with
such a syndrome and, for the good of all involved,
refuse them any teaching in meditation.

Somebody who has that syndrome and who wants
to cultivate the Hindu kind of All-is-One
absorption in the Great Self is asking for big trouble.
With weak ego boundaries to begin with, such a
person will easily mistake parts of the outside world —
including other people — as himself and vice versa.
The oceanic feeling may or may not be helpful to
various people, but definitely unhelpful to such a
person.

Somebody who has that syndrome and who wants
to visualise wrathful entities or non-entities is asking
for big trouble, but somebody who has that
syndrome and who wants to simply visualise
innocuous entities or non-entities may also invite big
trouble, as visualisation may help strengthen the
faculty of imagination in general, and with the
difficulty in differentiating what is inside and what is
outside already present, such a person will develop
an overly vivid imagination which will quickly
overrun any attempt at differentiating what is inside
and what is outside, so that projection and
introjection may become permanent fixtures of the
psyche. Whatever comes up in the mind will be
immediately and indiscriminately taken to be real
and external, and reacted to accordingly, often in
panic, if the person happens to harbour paranoid
delusions. The principle of reality is lost sight of,
reality testing is forgotten, and truth is a first victim,
quite simply because the person can't tell what's
real from what's simply occurring in the mind.
Fantasies are easily taken as real, and reality is
easily taken as pure fantasy, which all depends on
the respective emotional investments to them. This
wholesale reversal may give the impression that the
person floats in another world altogether.

As you say, Rett, a stable sense of identity is
necessary before embarking on any kind of
meditation, and it falls on teachers of meditation,
Buddhist or not, to avoid trouble by spotting
people who may disintegrate or fail reality testing
before giving them any teaching in meditation. The
people who want to learn meditation, including
visualisation, have the responsibility to themselves
to check themselves out, and have themselves
checked out, thoroughly from the neck up before
embarking on any such practice, as it may unravel
them or lead them to systematically confuse fantasy
with reality and vice versa.

Meditation, including visualisation, can be dangerous,
and is not to be recommended indiscriminately,
taught indiscriminately or practiced indiscriminately,
especially by those with weak ego structure."

Buddhism is nothing more than a carefully
reasoned-out programme for developmental learning.
Normal growth takes us somewhere, and Buddhism
takes us from there, brings us to full growth, and
then tops that off with helping us unload the self,
dropping all patterns and structures that accumulate
from genetic and social conditioning, and simplifying
ourselves by working out and retaining just a few
patterns that do not cause suffering. Resolving the
unfinished business all the way and letting it go is
awakening; that "grunge work" process has to be
done, and there is no magic to it. However if one has
not finished normal growth yet, one needs to live
normal life until one has finished normal growth,
then undertake Buddhist training, otherwise Buddhist
training probably won't be able to help.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 23 November 2006, in the "Straight or crooked?" thread, in reply to discussion about who benefits from Buddhism and what makes a practitioner grow. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

One of the most programmatic statements in the Tang Huyen corpus on the psychological infrastructure of Buddhist cultivation. The Zeigarnik effect provides the theoretical scaffolding: unfinished business repeats until resolved; Buddhist cultivation is nothing more than the systematic resolution of all such business. The 1999 exchange with Stan Fisher establishes the counter-intuitive thesis: Buddhism works best for the already-healthy, not the spiritually diseased. The 2000 exchange with Everett Thiele (Rett) on weak egos and Buddhist meditation is one of the most practically important warnings in the corpus. The post should be read as a companion to "The Vulnerable Type" (<[email protected]>), written one week later in the same thread.

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

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