I've recently updated and modified an essay I wrote a while ago which I posted on an anxiety forum I frequent titled 'A Philosophy of Anxiety'. I thought you guys might be interested in reading it. I must say, though, that over on that anxiety forum I generally have the most knowledge on the subject, but here I feel a little less secure in sharing it as I fear you guys might be able to spot my inevitable blunders. I'm also trying to confront my perfectionist tendencies at the moment so it is not as well groomed as it might have been a few months back. So, what I'm trying to say is, be gentle
Our desires delude us, as we lose sight of what we actually do have, in an effort to obtain what we do not have. What we end up with is a continual sense of loss. One of our main losses is contentment (Salzberg, 2002).
Through my university studies, my spiritual interests and my anxiety disorder, I have drawn some interesting conclusions about our relationship with being that I would like to share with you.
There is an implicit understanding amongst societies of what 'is'. This understanding is shared amongst people of a certain social group, culture or society. Within Western society, at least, there is a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of being. Adorno and Horkheimer, two mid-20th century critical theorists, unintentionally expounded the Eurocentric view of the nature of being in their work The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Adorno and Horkheimer wished to show that humanity wanted to exercise domination over nature. The analogy they used was of Odysseus in Homer's story of the Odyssey. Prior to his voyage home, Odysseus is warned that he will encounter the Sirens:
If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song.
In order to avoid a watery grave, Odysseus takes a wheel of wax and “stops the ears of all [his] men”. Odysseus, however, in a bid to cheat death yet experience the sweet bliss of the Sirens’ song, had issued his crew an order:
[T]ake me and bind me to the crosspiece half way up the mast; bind me as I stand upright, with a bond so fast that I cannot possibly break away, and lash the rope's ends to the mast itself. If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still.
In elaborating the motive of Odysseus, Adorno and Horkheimer quite convincingly elaborated humanity’s attempts to exert control over itself and its environment. It went further than this, however, as it also gives us an insight into a fundamental part of our nature: desire.
Desire and control are at the core of the Western motivations: our modus operandi. The two concepts are intricately related. We desire a certain image, a means by which we project ourselves onto other people, so we attempt to exert control over the resources we need to do so. We desire freedom from suffering – a freedom from sickness, aging and death, absolutely, but also from impermanence, uncontrollability, boredom, dissatisfaction etc. – so we attempt to control the perceived source of that suffering. We desire the perfect life, and so we attempt to control our circumstances and resources to achieve that.
We are, however, incapable of arriving at our goal. We cannot control our circumstances in order to ultimately sate our appetite. Odysseus tried: in the grip of the Sirens’ song he had “longed to hear them further” and thus been “frowning to [his] men that they should set [him] free”.
It is quite telling that both success and failure would cause Odysseus pain. His facial gestures, though entertaining to the contemporary reader, weren’t enough for him to alter his circumstance. Moreover, had he been successful he and his men would have dashed themselves on the rocks. In the throes of control and desire there will always be a conflict within us. Want will never produce satisfaction; power will always be finite.
This type of action is deeply entrenched in society. The next advertising break you see on television will be full of products for you to use to fulfill genuine or manufactured desires: a holiday as a cure to your desire to change your stressful circumstance; a new perfume to aid you in fulfilling sexual desires; a new car to aid you in asserting a certain cultural identity you desire. Motives to fulfill desire are endemic to contemporary social interaction.
Moreover, it is also at the root of our own discontent. After a certain and surprisingly low level of income, greater wealth does not increase the subjective experience of happiness. Want breeds want. A new car will not complete you. A new set of clothes will not make you whole.
[C]raving and fear circle around each other. Fear can often give rise to an intensified attachment, because if we fear that something might be taken away, we will crave for a means to secure it. By its very nature, desire brings fear, because we look to an unstable, changing world to bring us stable happiness. Thus we stand on quicksand, compounding the problem by blaming ourselves for failing to find security in this frantic and illusory pursuit (Salzberg, 2002)
Looking back to anxiety, we can see how deeply desire can affect us. We desperately hope the situation to be different to what it is: 'I hope this feeling in my chest goes away'; 'Why won't my feeling of dread disappear'; 'I hate these crazy thoughts, I wish they would stop'. We understand our ideal type of existence as a stationary equilibrium in which our mental, physical, emotional and social wellbeing are balanced, and we strive to achieve that state, directing and exerting influence over our environment, whilst rejecting the state that we are currently in. This causes us stress, which will continue to aggravate the symptoms, but it also leads us into thinking that there is an achievable ideal type of life just somewhere around the corner.
This, however, is misguided. This next point I am presenting is grounded in Buddhist philosophy. I stress here that it is the Buddhist philosophy rather than religion, because I do not wish to alienate those that engage other religious or atheistic practices. This philosophy is merely to contrast with and elaborate on Adorno and Horkheimer's assertions.
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that of Dukkha or ‘suffering’. We will always suffer. Birth, illness and death are suffering, yes. But suffering also comes in small doses - annoyances, uncontrollability, impermanence etc. The suffering that we are attempting to alleviate is inescapable. It is a truth of existence. It just simply is. We cannot alter what fundamentally is.
Nevertheless, it is not the act of suffering itself, which causes us the greatest distress and, specifically, anxiety. It the desire to escape from suffering that causes us anxiety. This is the second noble truth: that the cause of suffering is a resistance to, or grasping for, experience. Simply, that suffering is craving.
The Fourth Noble Truth of Buddhism, then, points to an escape from the cycle of grasping and aversion. It is summarised very succinctly in the following canonical statement:
the monk neither constructs in his mind, nor wills in order to produce, any state of mind or body, or the destruction of any such state. By not so willing anything in the world, he grasps after nothing; by not grasping, he is not anxious; he is therefore fully calmed within (Majjhima Nikaya III 244 cited in Carrithers, 1983, p. 73)
For Buddhists, then, we should not attempt to perpetually overcome instances of suffering. Nor should we cling to wellbeing. Instead, we should accept our experience. We should embrace it.
The path to true happiness is one of integrating and fully accepting all aspects of our experience. This integration is represented in the Taoist symbol of yin/yang, a circle which is half dark and half light. In the midst of the dark area is a spot of light, and in the midst of the light area is a spot of darkness. Even in the depth of darkness, the light is implicit. Even in the heart of light, the dark is understood, acknowledged, and absorbed. If things are not going well for us in life and we are suffering, we are not defeated by the pain of closed off to the light. If things are going well and we are happy, we are not defensively trying to deny the possibility of suffering. This unity, this integration, comes from deeply accepting darkness and light, and therefore being able to be in both simultaneously (Salzberg, 2002)
So, what would the Buddha have done had he been sailing towards the Sirens’ island? As with many religions, Buddhism is fraught with varying interpretations and contradictory teachings. To accept our circumstances, would we also need to simply accept the Sirens’ song? Would we hunker down and face our desires head-on, subject to the buffeting winds of human nature? Or would he accept the inevitable and make the decision to block his ears with wax, thus masking his desires?
Two different discourses have emerged in Buddhism:
I thought, Why don’t I grit my teeth, press my tongue against my palate, and use my mind to repress my mind? Then, as a wrestler might take hold of the head or the shoulders of someone weaker than he, and, in order to restrain and coerce that person, he has to hold him down constantly without letting go for a moment, so I gritted my teeth, pressed my tongue against my palate, and used my mind to suppress my mind. As I did this, I was bathed in sweat. Although I was not lacking in strength, although I maintained mindfulness and did not fall from mindfulness, my body and my mind were not at peace, and I was exhausted by these efforts. This practice caused other feelings of pain to arise in me besides the pain associated with the austerities, and I was not able to tame my mind. (Mahasaccaja Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 36. cited in Hanh, T.N. 1999)
The above passage, then, warns against the perils of attempting to conquer mind with mind. Though we might be successful in releasing ourselves from the draw of the Sirens’ song through mere thought alone, subjecting oneself to that strain would produce pain and ultimately keep us at war with ourselves.
This sentiment, however, is directly contradicted in the following passage with curiously similar language:
Just as a wrestler takes hold of the head or the shoulders of someone weaker than himself, restrains and coerces that person, and holds him down constantly, not letting go for one moment, so a monk who meditates in order to stop all unwholesome thoughts of desire and aversion, when these thoughts continue to arise, should grit his teeth, press his tongue against his palate, and do his best to use his mind to beat down and defeat his mind. (Vitakka Santhana Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 20. cited in Hanh, T.N. 1999).
Thich Nhat Hanh, the contemporary author and Buddhist monk who draws our attention to these conflicting passages, is of the belief that the former passage is what the Buddha had initially taught. When we consider ‘The Middle Way’ – a central tenant of Buddhism that encourages us to navigate a line between asceticism and excess – we see that he is probably correct.
Moreover, we have yet more evidence of the inefficacy of the latter approach closer to home. How many of us here have tried to ‘fight mind with mind’? I think if it were possible to think your way out of anxiety disorder, most of us might be off leading anxiety free lives right now. Jonathan Foer writes:
I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
So where does this leave us in the context of anxiety? If desire and, subsequently, control are at the heart of suffering, should we seek to obliterate desire? Should we seek to absolutely relinquish control?
Balance, here, is key. We moderate where we can. To overthrow the pathological operating systems of our Western psyche we need to recognise what is uncontrollable; identify unproductive desires; and question our automatic behaviours.
How, though? How is that possible? Are we still not, then, just trying to move mind with mind? One of the best analogies I have heard to elaborate this is of the ‘second arrow’. Imagine you are in a battlefield, and you have just been shot in the leg with an arrow. The first arrow is there, there is not a whole lot, in that precise moment, which can be done about the fact there is an arrow in your leg. However, a moment later the second arrow arrives: ‘OH MY FREAKING GOD I HAVE AN ARROW STICKING OUT OF MY LEG’. The first arrow we have no control over, the second arrow we do.
On this very website this approach is already promoted. When anxiety symptoms arise, we are encouraged to 'rise above' them. We are encouraged not to worry about them. In essence, we are encouraged to let them just 'be', as they are the true nature of our existence in that very moment. This passive acceptance of symptoms is promoted by multiple sources that are designed to assist in anxiety relief.
The basis of the Buddha’s psychological teaching is that our efforts to control what is inherently uncontrollable cannot yield the security, safety, and happiness we seek. By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we only bring suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives (Salzberg, 2002)
Passive acceptance, however, is not to say that we should not be active. Not only would it have been best to avoid getting shot by an arrow in the first place, but, given the simple nature that we cannot control the future or even the present, in the event you do get hit with the arrow it is now best to seek medical attention. Simply by acknowledging and accepting what essentially exists in that moment, however, not only allows us to be free from the second arrow, but it makes our subsequent decisions that much more grounded. If I am thirsty, I do not simply accept that I am thirsty and do nothing about it, I go get a glass of water! However, I get a glass of water in the knowledge that I am doing it to quench my thirst, not out of fear that I might die of dehydration if I don’t.
Recognising this to be true for you and actually practicing it are, however and unfortunately, two different things. The best means to really get to grips with and become proficient in allowing experience to flow through us without clinging or controlling is to practice mindfulness. The Buddha taught mindfulness as part of the Eight Fold Path in order to free ourselves from the cycle of suffering. Fortunately, it is no longer strictly a religious practice and has been adapted to provide a good psychological grounding to fend off our tendencies towards greed and control in the contemporary West. I will make a few book recommendations at the end of this article if you would like to find out more.
There does, however, seem to be a void. We have the method to relinquish control and to nullify desire, but what gives it energy? Very simply: the act of lovingkindness, warm heartedness, or unconditional friendliness – our innate human essence – casts everything in a glowing light. It allows us to open up to our experience, to our fellow human beings, to ourselves, where previously we were closed. Cultivating warmth and gratitude is a priceless gift, and it will give us the strength and stability – a platform – from which we can observe the constant flow of suffering in the knowledge that it too is a part of us:
[ I]t comes as we learn to truly love ourselves and all beings, so that love provides the light by which we bear witness to those burdens, watching them simply fall away (Salzberg, 2002)
Below are a few books that I have taken key pointers and quotes from for the above post:
John Kabat-Zinn: Wherever you go, there you are
Andrew Olendzki: Unlimiting Mind
Mark Williams & Danny Penman: Finding Peace in a Frantic World
Michael Carrithers: The Buddha
Sharon Salzberg: Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness
Thich Nhat Hanh: The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
I wish you all the best of peace and health.
