I wrote this some years ago for the benefit of a much younger friend.
I think it was Socrates who was supposed to have said that knowing that you don’t know is the beginning of Wisdom. Knowing that you don’t know could be a definition of confusion. If you think you know you are unlikely to experience confusion. Confusion, you could say, is the beginning of Wisdom.
Confusion is often what people experience when they embark on the Buddhist spiritual path. On the one hand it all seems reasonably clear intellectually. On the other hand we seem to experience all sorts of emotional upheaval. And the practices don’t seem to quite bring the results that we anticipated. I think that one way to understand all this is to think in terms of a process or path of integration, positive emotion, spiritual death and spiritual rebirth.
When we start out we are not psychically integrated. Our psyche seems to be divided into mutually exclusive parts, as if we were more than one person. When person A is in the ascendant person B is nowhere to be seen, and vice versa. The territory of our psyche is divided into different countries with very different histories and very different ways of approaching the world. And with strong borders. Becoming integrated then is analogous to the development of a united states or European union.
How does integration come about? It would seem that the first stage is an intensification of conflict or at least a more acute awareness of conflict. So we start meditating and as far as we know we are fully behind it but then after a while we become aware that we are not fully behind it. In fact some quite large chunks of our psyche are in open rebellion and resist all our efforts. This causes discomfort, distress and confusion. This confusion and distress is like the upheaval caused by war between nations. And this suffering provides the impetus to seek solutions.
Just as nations have to recognise eventually that their interests are best served by cooperation so the disparate tendencies in our own psyche have to eventually see that they are mutually dependent and actually want the same thing- relief from suffering. This is not so easy as it might seem. Generally what we do is try to strengthen one side of the conflict in order to vanquish the other and gain peace in that way. Or we blame the whole thing on outside causes i.e. other people or circumstances. This can go on for a very long time. It is a habitual psychological delusion.
But if we persist in our explorations through meditation and conversation and reflection eventually the penny will drop. What happens is that at some point we see clearly what we had perhaps suspected before, that our suffering is self-created. My own experience of this was that when I finally saw what I was doing it was a very fleeting thought that nevertheless had the power of a depth charge so that my life changed completely as a result. There were two particular occasions when I experienced integration happening,
On the first occasion I was writing a dialogue between two aspects of myself, which I characterised as a father and son. The dialogue began as a fierce conflict but as I continued to write something happened which is difficult to explain. The two characters (who were both me) started to recognise that they had no choice but to live with each other and eventually agreed to compromise. This was accompanied by a strong emotional charge and I was aware that something significant had happened. I initially assumed that the outcome of this would be that I would have to change my life considerably to accommodate these seemingly disparate elements, but in fact as time passed all the change seemed to take place internally. It was more like a new way of being than a new way of doing. These changes were accompanied by particular images coming up in meditation (I remember images of lakes). The conflict, and the emotional instability that had been the most distressing part of it, just faded away. This experience was the culmination of many months of intense difficulty and struggling to understand myself and what was happening to me. Identifying the two sides of the conflict as father and son, recognisable characters, one a disciplinarian and the other very young and petulant, was a big help. There was at least one dream along the way that was also helpful.
The second occasion when I experienced another level of integration was about one year later. For many years I had from time to time dropped into a dismal mental state where I felt that nobody cared about me and I was totally isolated. I knew intellectually that this wasn’t true but nevertheless I would still fall into this state of despair. On this particular occasion I woke up one Sunday morning and found myself in this state of mind and for some reason I decided I was going to just stay with it and explore it and experience it fully. I spent the day in my room writing reams of tortured analysis of what was going on and long outbursts of blame and ill will towards everybody I knew. Then at some point as I was saying to myself ‘they don’t care’ the thought came to me ‘I don’t care enough’ and then the thought ‘I am doing this to myself’ and that was it. It was as if a little bubble burst and there was no more energy in my resentment of the world. I just got up and made some tea for myself and my flatmate. This time I was not aware of anything significant having happened. It just felt like I had run out of steam. However over the following months and years I realised that this incident had been a major turning point in my life, perhaps the major turning point. It was the first time I had really allowed Metta (loving kindness) into my life fully. That thought ‘ I am doing this to myself’ seems to have sunk deeply into me and it has never been possible since then to get into that self-pitying, isolated, sort of state. An analogy that has occurred to me is that it is as if you had a habit of stamping on your own foot and just couldn’t see that you were doing it so you keep looking around for others to blame or for some complicated explanation for your pain and then suddenly (or gradually) you see that it is you who is causing the pain and having seen it, it is just not possible to stamp on your own foot again.
The basic insight is ‘ I am doing this’. Where before there had been confusion and a tendency to think that I was either deeply flawed or the victim of a terrible childhood or the victim of other peoples lack of care, now I could see with clarity that all of that was just an emotional smokescreen and the simple truth was that for whatever reason I was the one who was giving myself a hard time. The practical outcome of this is broadly speaking an ability to turn away from self-concern and take a more genuine interest in the spiritual welfare of others. This could be seen as the spiritual death and rebirth resulting from the integration and positive emotion.
To go back to the analogy of nations, it is as if the Israelis and Palestinians suddenly realised that they both wanted the same things (which of course they do) and started to cooperate and realise their interdependence. And then later they look out and see that in fact all nations want the same things, even those at war, and so they start trying to help others to see what they have seen and work towards a united nations. We need to work towards a united nations of the mind and then from that will grow the desire to work towards a spiritual unity of humanity.
Integration is a recognition of the interdependence of all the disparate aspects of our psyche, the intellectual, the emotional, the active, the lazy, the child, the disciplinarian, the rebel, the conformist, the sexual, the spiritual and so on. It is the gaining of a bigger perspective that is able to embrace our entirety. And this seems to give rise to positive emotion on the basis of which our ability to be more altruistic grows. And this process of integration, positive emotion, altruism, seems to carry on at different levels, a spiral path. What integration and positive emotion are on a psychological plane, spiritual death and rebirth are on a slightly higher level. But really I am coming to the conclusion that all these terms are describing just one experience that has different aspects to it as it unfolds. What this means is that if we can just manage to achieve more and more integration of our minds/hearts then spiritual progress follows quite naturally. This is another way of saying that wisdom is compassion and compassion is wisdom. The wisdom of a bigger perspective on ourselves leads to a bigger perspective on others and this leads quite naturally to compassion, which is the quintessential spiritual emotion.
I think there is inevitably some inner conflict and confusion to be experienced on the spiritual path, but if worked with this can lead to psychic integration and a bigger perspective. Writing was one of the ways I found very helpful in working with this. On both occasions when I had major breakthroughs it was as the result of writing. The first time it was writing an internal dialogue and on the second occasion it was an almost obsessive analysis of what I was experiencing as I was experiencing it. The other thing I found helpful was talking to people who had already been through quite a bit of the same confusion.
