September 2011
14 posts
5 tags
"Terror and delight"
“…when the path of insight is analyzed carefully, stages with predominantly two contrasting affective tones can be discriminated, what the Visuddhimagga, the classic textbook of Buddhist psychology, calls experiences of “terror and delight”
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…experiences of terror, on the other hand, derive from the investigating aspects of the mindfulness practice and from...
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Importance of the conceptual understanding
“Confusion over what is meant by ego can arise here, with many mistaking egolessness for abandonment of the theoretical/ metapsychological/structural ego. Egolessness, in this case, is confused with the absence of repression, or with liberation from psychological defenses, a view which often encourages the release of buried sexual or aggressive longing. This can be thought of as a...
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Importance of both mindfulness and concentration
“Refusing to progress either on the path of concentration, by focusing the mind on a single object, or on the path of mindfulness, by moving from attention to content to attention to process, the meditator can be caught up in a fascination with psychological material without moving toward any resolution of conflict. Rorschach studies of experienced meditators showed no diminution of internal...
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Mindfulness // Bare attention
“Preliminary practices of meditation, just like beginning psychoanalysis, require the meditator to take his or her own experience as the object of awareness. In Buddhist terms, the attentional strategy is called “bare attention,” while in psycho-analytic terms it is called “evenly suspended attention” or free association. Both require what Freud called the suspension...
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Dual orientation of narcissism
“Guntrip (1971) insists that “every personality” hovers “between two opposite fears, the fear of isolation in independence with loss of ego in a vacuum of experience, and the fear of bondage to, of imprisonment or absorption in the personality of whomever he rushes to for protection” (p. 291). These two poles, of grandiosity or omnipotence on the one hand, and...
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False view on (and fear of) emptiness
“This is also the fundamental danger for the rest of us in progressing on the path of meditation. We are all prone to ignore the falsely conceived self by dwelling in the tranquil stabilization that meditation practice offers. These states, which can become ineffably sublime, offer experiences of oneness far removed from our usual personalities that can be mistaken for emptiness by an...
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Emptiness, depressive personality
“In the depressive personality, emptiness functions as a kind of one step beyond loneliness. Not only is the loved object missed and longed for, but there is an internal void and a feeling of an incapacity for love. There may be a deeply felt sense of unworthiness that attributes the loss of the other to the person’s own badness (Kernberg, 1975); thus depressed persons come to feel...
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Emptiness, schizoid personality type
“The schizoid personality tends to feel emptiness as an “innate quality” (Kernberg, 1975) of their being that makes them different from other people, who they can see have feelings of “love, hatred, tenderness, longing or mourning” (p. 215) that they find unavailable within themselves. The schizoid stance has been seen as a defense against feeling longing for...
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Emptiness, narcissist personality type
“Emptiness in the narcissist is a result of the void that is created in the internal world of object relations through the constant devaluation of others (Kernberg, 1982). This is a pervasive feeling that can be temporarily interrupted only by admiration from others (Kernberg, 1975), which tends to be all that is sought in intimate relationships.
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Narcissists are much more likely to...
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The Buddhist Doctrine of Non-Self, and the Problem... →
Highly recommended article for proper understanding of “non-self”. One of “the Middle Way” articles.
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Emptiness, borderline personality
“…borderline personality, for instance, what is most lacking is the synthetic or integrative capacity of the ego to consolidate and maintain multiple, conflicting self/object representations. The relationship of the self with internalized object relationships is distorted by the defense of splitting, in which all good and all bad representations of the same person cannot be integrated....
3 tags
“It is said that someone who tries to meditate without a conceptual understanding...”
– Kalu Rinpoche, “The Dharma”, Albany: S.U.N.Y. Press, 1986. (p. 113)
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“The practice of bodhisattvas has emptiness as its realization: when beginning...”
– Dayi Daoxin, fourth Zen Patriarch