The Antidote (6 page)

What Ellis had grasped about his unstated beliefs concerning conversation with women – an insight he would later extend to the beliefs that lie behind all instances of worry or anxiety – is that they were absolutist. To put it another way, it wasn't just that he
wanted
to be less shy, and that he
wanted
to be able to talk to women. Rather, he had been operating under the absolutist conviction that he
needed
their approval. Later, he would coin a name for this habit of mind: ‘musturbation'. We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we
must
have; we feel we
must
perform well in certain circumstances, or that other people
must
treat us well. Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not. No wonder we get so anxious: we've decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn't merely be bad, but completely bad – absolutely terrible.

Ellis's encounters in the Bronx Botanical Garden had shown him that the worst-case scenario – rejection – was far from the absolute disaster he had been fearing. ‘Nobody took out a stiletto and cut my balls off,' he remembered. ‘Nobody vomited and ran away. Nobody called the cops.' It was actually a good thing, Stoically speaking, that none of his conversations had ended in thrilling dates; if he had achieved such a spectacular result, it
might subtly have reinforced his irrational beliefs about the awfulness of
not
achieving them. This ‘shame-attacking exercise', as he later came to refer to these kinds of undertakings, was the ‘premeditation of evils' rendered real and immediate. The worst thing about any event, Ellis liked to say, ‘is usually your exaggerated belief in its horror'. The way to defuse that belief was to confront the reality – and in reality, getting rejected by women turned out to be merely undesirable, not horrifying or terrible. Later, as a working psychotherapist, Ellis devised other shame-attacking exercises; in one, he sent his clients onto the streets of Manhattan with instructions to approach strangers and to say to them: ‘Excuse me, I just got out of the lunatic asylum – can you tell me what year it is?' It showed the clients that being thought of as crazy wouldn't kill them. In another, he instructed people to take rides on the New York City subway, calling out loud the names of the stations. When he told me about this, I replied that I thought I'd find such an exercise paralysingly embarrassing. Ellis said that was exactly why I should try it.

Explaining the difference between a
terrible
outcome and a merely
undesirable
one became a governing mission of Ellis's career. He went so far as to insist that nothing at all could ever be absolutely terrible – ‘because', he wrote, ‘when you insist that an undesirable event is awful or terrible, you are implying, if you're honest with yourself, that it is as bad as it could be.' Yet nothing could be 100 per cent bad, he argued, because it could always conceivably be worse. Even if one were murdered, ‘that is very bad, but not one hundred per cent bad,' because several of your loved ones could meet the same fate, ‘and that would be worse. If you are tortured to death slowly, you could always be tortured to death slower.' He did grudgingly concede that there was one event that might legitimately be viewed as 100 per cent bad: the complete
destruction of absolutely everything on the planet. But that, he pointed out, ‘hardly seems likely in the near future'.

This might seem like a bizarrely cold-hearted attitude to take towards such things as torture or murder; it seems tasteless to try to construct elaborate hypothetical scenarios merely to find something that could be worse than them. But it is precisely in the context of such extremely undesirable scenarios, Ellis insisted, that the strategy of focusing on the worst-case scenario – and distinguishing between
very bad
and
completely terrible
events – really comes into its own. It turns infinite fears into finite ones. One of his clients, he recalled, found herself unable to pursue a romantic life because of an extreme fear that she might contract Aids from kissing, or even from shaking hands. If a friend suffered from such an anxiety, your first response might be reassurance: pointing out, in other words, how extremely unlikely it was that this scenario would ever occur. That was Ellis's first response, too. But, as we've seen, reassurance carries a sting: reassuring the woman that her fears were unlikely to come true did nothing to dislodge her belief that it would be unimaginably bad if they did. And so Ellis switched to negative visualisation instead. Suppose you did get Aids, he said. That would be pretty bad. But absolutely horrific, or 100 per cent terrible? Obviously not: one could imagine worse scenarios. One always can. And one could imagine still finding sources of happiness in life, despite having contracted Aids. The distinction between judging something to be ‘very bad' and judging it to be ‘absolutely horrific' makes all the difference in the world. It is only to the absolutely horrific that we respond with blind terror; all other fears are finite, and thus susceptible to being coped with. Grasping this at last, Ellis's client was able to stop fearing an inconceivably terrible calamity, and instead begin taking normal precautions to avoid a highly undesirable, though also highly unlikely, worst-case scenario. Moreover, she had internalised the
Stoic understanding that it was not within her control to eliminate all possibility of the fate that she feared. ‘If you accept that the universe is uncontrollable,' Ellis told me, ‘you're going to be a lot less anxious.'

Such Stoic insights served Ellis especially well in the months after I met him. His final days were afflicted not only by intestinal problems and pneumonia, but by a dispute with the other directors of the Institute. They fired him from the board, cancelled his Friday night workshops, and stopped paying for his accommodation, forcing him to move out. He sued, a judge ruled in his favour, and by the time of his death he was back in his apartment. True to his principles, he insisted that the
contretemps
had never made him upset. It was all highly undesirable, of course, but not horrific, and there was no point insisting that the entire universe fall in line with his wishes. The other members of the board, he told one reporter, were ‘fucked-up, fallible human beings – just like everyone else'.

‘Chancery Lane.'

I speak the words out loud, but in such a nervous croak that I'm not sure anybody hears them. Glancing up and down the carriage, I can't see any evidence of anyone having noticed. Then the middle-aged man sitting opposite me glances up from his newspaper, with an expression I can only describe as one of mild interest. I meet his eye for a moment, then look away. Nothing else happens. The train stops. Some people get off. Suddenly, it occurs to me that I have subconsciously been expecting something calamitous to happen – an explosion of ridicule, at least. Now that it hasn't, I feel disoriented.

As we approach Holborn, I say ‘Holborn' – louder this time,
and less tremulously. The same man looks up. A baby two seats away stares at me, open-mouthed, but would probably have done so anyway.

It is at Tottenham Court Road that I cross some kind of psychic boundary. The adrenaline subsides, the panic dissipates, and I find myself confronting the very truth that Albert Ellis's Stoical shame-attacking experiment had been designed to beat into my brain: that none of this is anywhere near as bad as I'd been anticipating. I have been left with no option but to see that my fear of embarrassment was based on profoundly irrational ideas about how terrible it would be if people thought badly of me. The truth is that they aren't being outwardly mocking or hostile at all – mainly, no doubt, because they're much too busy thinking about themselves. At Tottenham Court Road, a few more people look my way when I speak. But I don't care anymore. I feel invincible.

Three stations further on, at Marble Arch, I get up and leave the train, beaming to myself, suffused with Stoic serenity. Nobody in the carriage seems particularly interested in that, either.

You want it to be one way. But it's the other way.

– Marlo Stanfield in
The Wire

I
N THE EARLY
1960s, Robert Aitken, an American Zen Buddhist living in Hawaii, began to notice something inexplicable and alarming. Aitken was one of the pioneers in bringing Buddhism to the spiritually hungry West, and at their home in Honolulu, he and his wife Anne had opened a
zendo,
or meditation centre, catering mainly to the island's growing population of hippies. But something about a number of the new meditation students didn't seem right. They would arrive, and sit down on their cushions at the appointed time, where they would remain still as stones, apparently meditating; but then, when the bell rang to signal the end of a meditation period, they would rise to their feet – and immediately collapse onto the ground. It took Aitken several weeks of tactful enquiries to establish what was going on. Word had got around, among the hippies of Honolulu, that attempting Zen meditation while under the influence of LSD was the ultimate trip, an express train to mind-blowing ecstasy.

As the craze for Buddhist meditation spread further through America and Europe, the notion that it was a shortcut to ecstasy proved a popular one. Back in the 1950s, that had certainly been what had appealed to Jack Kerouac, who embraced it with an enthusiasm he otherwise reserved for whisky and magic mushrooms. Blood circulation problems meant that it caused him agony to sit cross-legged for more than a few minutes at a time, but he battled on anyway, determined to penetrate new realms of bliss. Sometimes, it even seemed to work. ‘Fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,' he wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg, describing his early efforts. ‘The glands inside my brain discharging the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) … healing all my sickness … erasing all … ‘ More often, though, his knees simply hurt too much, and after a short time he would be forced, as one Kerouac biographer notes, ‘to scramble to his feet and rub his legs to restore circulation'.

These days, the more prevalent stereotype about meditation is that it is a path not to ecstasy but to trance-like calm. It sometimes seems impossible to open a magazine, or a newspaper features section, without being preached to about the relaxation-inducing benefits of mindfulness meditation. The stock photograph most commonly used to illustrate such articles is of a woman in a leotard, on a beach; her legs are crossed and her eyes closed, and an insipid smile is playing on her lips. (If the topic of the article is ‘using meditation in everyday life', it's sometimes a man or woman in a business suit, instead – same cross-legged posture, same smile.) The Australian meditation teacher Paul Wilson, the bestselling self-styled ‘guru of calm', has done much to reinforce this stereotype: his books on meditation include
The Calm Technique, Instant Calm, The Little Book of Calm, The Big
Book of Calm, Calm at Work, Calm Mother, Calm Child, The Complete Book of Calm
and
Calm for Life.

The idea of meditation as a path to calmness is somewhat more realistic, since calmness – unlike unbroken ecstasy – can indeed be one of its side effects. Yet all these associations have contributed to a modern image of meditation as a sophisticated form of positive thinking, which is almost the opposite of the truth. In fact, meditation has little to do with achieving any specific desired state of mind, no matter whether blissful or calm. At Buddhism's core, instead, is an often misunderstood notion that is starkly opposed to most contemporary assumptions about how to be happy, and that places it squarely on the ‘negative path' to happiness: non-attachment.

At the root of all suffering, says the second of the four ‘noble truths' that define Buddhism, is attachment. The fact that we desire some things, and dislike or hate others, is what motivates virtually every human activity. Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging and aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold onto it forever, and push away what we don't like, trying to avoid it at all costs. Both constitute attachment. Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but
suffering
is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent. Develop a strong attachment to your good looks – as opposed to merely enjoying them while they last – and you will suffer when they fade, as they inevitably will; develop a strong attachment to your luxurious lifestyle, and your life may become an unhappy, fearful struggle to keep things that way. Attach too strongly to life, and death will seem all the more frightening. (The parallels here with
Stoicism, and with Albert Ellis's distinction between what we prefer and what we feel we must have, aren't coincidental; the traditions overlap in countless ways.) Non-attachment need not mean withdrawing from life, or suppressing natural impulses, or engaging in punishing self-denial. It simply means approaching the whole of life – inner thoughts and emotions, outer events and circumstances – without clinging or aversion. To live non-attachedly is to feel impulses, think thoughts, and experience life without becoming hooked by mental narratives about how things ‘should' be, or should never be, or should remain forever. The perfectly non-attached Buddhist would be simply, calmly present, and non-judgmentally aware.

Which, let's be frank, isn't going to happen for most of us any time soon. The idea of living without wanting things to be one way rather than another way strikes most people as a strange sort of goal. How could you not be attached to having good friends, to enjoying fulfilling relationships, or to doing well for yourself materially? And how could you be happy if you weren't thus attached? Meditation might indeed be the path to non-attachment, as the Buddhists claim – but it is by no means clear, to anyone accustomed to the standard approaches to happiness, why that's a destination that one might ever wish to reach.

What first led me to question this commonsense position was the title of a slim book by another American Zen Buddhist and trained psychiatrist. It was called
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness,
and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life ‘better' or ‘happier', in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding. The point, instead, was to learn how to stop trying to fix things, to stop being so preoccupied with trying to control one's experience of the world, to
give up
trying to replace unpleasant thoughts and emotions
with more pleasant ones, and to see that, through dropping the ‘pursuit of happiness', a more profound peace might result. Or, rather, that wasn't the ‘point', exactly, because Magid objected to the notion that meditation had a point. If it did, he seemed to imply, that would make it just another happiness technique, a way of satisfying our desire to cling to certain states and eliminate others. This was all deeply confusing. What would be the point, I wondered, of doing something pointless? Why would anyone try to end the pursuit of happiness, if not to become happy – in which case, wouldn't they still be pursuing happiness, only by more cunning means?

Barry Magid practised psychiatry in a large, sparsely furnished room on the ground floor of an apartment block near Central Park, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was unlit save for a desk lamp, and its two leather chairs were placed unusually far from each other, against opposite walls, so that Magid's head seemed to loom out at me from the dark. He was a tall, owlish man in his early sixties, with wire-rimmed glasses, and when I asked him a rambling question about Buddhism and non-attachment, he looked at me with mild amusement. Then he started talking about something else entirely.

What I really needed to understand, he told me, was the myth of Oedipus. In Magid's view, the famous tale of the ancient Greek king – who kills his father and marries his mother, bringing disaster to his family and his city, and prompting him to gouge out his eyes – was the perfect metaphor for what was wrong with pursuing happiness. This had little to do with the ‘Oedipus complex', Freud's theory about boys secretly wanting to have sex with their mothers. The real message of the myth, Magid explained, was that struggling to escape your demons was what gave them their power. It was the ‘backwards law' in mythological
form: clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to eliminate all possibility of an unhappy one, was the cause of the problem, not its solution.

You may be familiar with the story. When Oedipus is born to the King and Queen of Thebes, his horrible fate – that he will kill one parent, and marry the other – has already been foretold by an oracle. His mother and father, desperate to ensure that this never comes to pass, persuade a local shepherd to take the newborn, with instructions to abandon him to the elements. But the shepherd can't bring himself to let Oedipus die; the child lives, and subsequently becomes the adoptive son of the King and Queen of Corinth. But when Oedipus confronts them, some time later, with the rumour that he is adopted, they deny it – so when he hears about the oracle's terrible prophecy, he assumes that they are the parents to whom it refers. Resolving to escape the curse by putting as much distance as possible between himself and the couple he takes to be his parents, Oedipus travels far away. Unfortunately, the faraway place at which he arrives is Thebes. Thereafter, fate drags him to his inevitable end: first, he becomes involved in an unlikely dispute over a chariot, and kills its occupant, who turns out to have been his father. Then he falls in love with his mother.

One obvious reading of this myth is that you can never escape your fate, no matter how hard you try. But Magid preferred another. ‘The quintessential point,' he told me, ‘is that if you flee it, it'll come back to bite you. The very thing from which you're in flight – well, it's the fleeing that brings on the problem. For Freud, our whole psychology is organised around this avoidance. The unconscious is the repository of everything that we're avoiding.'

The founding myth of Buddhism is practically a mirror-image of all this. The Buddha becomes psychologically free – enlightened
– by confronting negativity, suffering and impermanence, rather than struggling to avoid it. According to legend, the historical Buddha was born Siddharta Gautama, the son of a king, in a palace in the foothills of the Himalayas. Like Oedipus, his destiny had been foretold: it was prophesied that he would become either a powerful king or a holy man. In common with parents throughout history, Siddharta's preferred the job description that came with good pay and security, and so they dedicated themselves to making sure their son would grow to love privilege. They made his life a luxurious prison, pampering him with fine foods and armies of servants; he even managed to marry and have a son without once leaving his bubble of entitlement. It was only at the age of twenty-nine that he managed to venture outside the compound. There, he saw what have become enshrined in Buddhist lore as the ‘Four Sights': an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic monk. The first three symbolised the inevitability of impermanence, and the three fates awaiting us all. Siddharta was shocked into abandoning his comfortable life, and his family, to become an itinerant monk. It was in India, some years later, that he is supposed to have achieved enlightenment after spending the night sitting beneath a fig tree, thereby becoming the Buddha, ‘the one who woke up'. But it was those initial sights, according to the myth, that first awoke his understanding of impermanence. Buddhism's path to serenity began with a confrontation with the negative.

From Barry Magid's Buddhist–Freudian point of view, then, most people who thought they were ‘seeking happiness' were really running away from things of which they were barely aware. Meditation, the way he described it, was a way to stop running. You sat still, and watched your thoughts and emotions and desires and aversions come and go, and you resisted the urge to try to
flee from them, to fix them, or to cling to them. You practised non-attachment, in other words. Whatever came up, negative or positive, you stayed present and observed it. It wasn't about escaping into ecstasy – or even into calmness, as the word is normally understood; and it certainly wasn't about positive thinking. It was about the significantly greater challenge of declining to do any of that.

It was shortly after meeting Magid that I took the rash decision to spend a week with forty strangers, meditating for about nine hours a day, in the middle of a forest, in the depths of winter, many miles from the nearest town, in almost unbroken silence.

Which proved interesting.

‘The basic meditation instruction is really incredibly simple,' said Howard, one of the two teachers charged with running the retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, a converted turn-of-the-century mansion in the remote pine forests of central Massachusetts. It was early evening, and all forty of us were seated on cushions filled with buckwheat hulls in the building's austere main hall, listening to a man with a voice so calming it was impossible to imagine an instruction he might give that you wouldn't be lulled into following. ‘Sit comfortably, gently close your eyes, and notice the breath as it flows in and out. You can focus on this sensation at the nostrils, or at the abdomen. Just follow one breath in, and one breath out. And then do it again.' There were nervous chuckles; surely it wasn't going to be that simple, or that boring? ‘Other things will come up,' Howard continued. ‘Physical sensations, feelings and thoughts will carry us away into distraction. In meditation, when we notice that happening, we don't judge. We just return to the breath.' It really was that simple, apparently. What
he failed to point out – though we were to discover it soon enough – was that ‘simple' didn't mean ‘easy'.