AC: In my own teaching work over the years, I've found that when one courageously looks into what enlightenment promises, one discovers an absolute perspective. And after that discovery, one either sees oneself as the one who was wounded and traumatized, or one recognizes oneself to be that which was never wounded or traumatized by anything. I've seen people leap from the perspective of the ego to one beyond the ego. One in which they discover a completely different relationship to their own experience. This new, liberated perspective may indeed include the awareness or memory of trauma, narcissism, fear, doubt, etcetera, but now, because they have discovered a completely different way of relating to their fundamental sense of self, their relationship to the ego and all of its baggage will be transformed.

You say that psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation practice often work hand in hand and that they work with different parts of the self. But I've noticed that when we allow ourselves to identify in any fundamental way with being the one who suffered, who was traumatized and who therefore needs to be healed, it inevitably has a profound effect on the way we relate to the very real and maybe continuing effects of whatever that trauma may have been. If, from the context of enlightenment, we have recognized the ultimate insubstantiality of the ego or personal self—that from an absolute perspective it does not exist—not just intellectually but deeply through our own experience, our relationship to whatever may be the continuing karmic consequences of our personal history is going to be very different than if we are convinced we are exclusively that separate self.

I wonder if psychotherapy and meditation practice really do work hand in hand to heal and liberate our humanity in the way that many transpersonal therapists say they do. I mean, theoretically they do, but because the context of the inquiry in psychotherapy is always relative, by definition—which means giving significance to the woes of the ego or personal self—I often wonder if, without an absolute context as the bottom line, psychotherapy could ever have anything to do with what liberation has always been about.

JE: I'm not talking theory. I'm talking about what I've seen in people. I've seen both kinds of effort work together, both in teaching spiritual practice and in doing therapy. I think what you say is true—a fundamental shift does occur in the way one relates to one's experience through spiritual practice. But it feels a little more complex to me. I would say both the personal identifications and the nonidentification with experience are quite real. I both am and am not that person. It's not that from this perspective I am and from that perspective I am not. Both are true: I both am and am not. I remember a conference in New York with His Holiness the Dalai Lama where someone started to raise a question about these two levels of reality, the relative and the absolute. They prefaced their remark with a comment about the relative level, saying, "Of course, I know that this ultimately isn't real . . . " His Holiness interrupted them right away and said, "Stop. It's very real. And if you deny its reality, you will create much suffering for yourself."

AC: That's definitely true, but I'm not talking about denying anything that's true. I'm talking specifically about our ultimate identity and what the effects are of that discovery on our relationship to our personal history.

JE: Let's take the case of trauma. Some very traumatic events happened—sexual abuse, let's say—and had very real consequences that deserve our compassion and our understanding. All of that was true. Did it happen to me? In some ultimate sense, no, of course not. But then, nothing does insofar as that "me" doesn't exist absolutely and independently. If what you're asking is: Does that shift in perspective substitute for therapy or does it shift the relationship to experience enough so that other kinds of therapeutic work become unnecessary? Well, I've never seen that.

AC: Okay. But my whole point is that the absolute or liberated perspective provides a completely different context in which to view and have a relationship with every aspect of our humanity.

JE: You see, a lot of the Indian practitioners I met when I was doing research in Calcutta had suffered extreme trauma in their lives, just like many Western students. Really bad stuff. And some of them had reached pretty deep levels of enlightenment. No one claimed or presented themselves as having completed the path, but they had attained fairly deep levels. But it was clear that even with the shift occurring that you described, there was still a lot of personal suffering in their lives that they were going through and that had not been addressed—and was not getting addressed. And we see that in a lot of Western students and Western teachers. They've had their kensho experiences, their enlightenment experiences, and they're going down like flies. They're still misbehaving, sometimes outrageously so. They're still engaging in a lot of misconduct around—what else?—money, sex and power. So there's still a lot of personal work to be done. The only alternative position I think you can take is: Do more practice! Get more deeply enlightened. Go to the end of the path, and then none of this will ultimately be a problem for you. Well, I suppose that's a defensible position. In principle that's what should happen. I've just never seen it. Maybe I just don't know people who've gone to the end of the path. There ain't too many of them around.

AC: That's true.

JE: Even in the case of very deeply enlightened teachers, there is a lot of meshuganah [crazy] stuff that they can be involved in.

AC: I know. And that creates a lot of doubt about the possibility of any kind of transformation that can express an attainment or stabilization in a perspective that is absolute.

JE: I guess the only thing you can say is that, short of full and complete freedom, there's personal work to do. And you either do it or you don't.

AC: You said earlier that in the deeper levels of spiritual practice and experience, there is a transcendence or a letting go that occurs on a deeper level than that of the personality. It's a level that you said was universal.

JE: Right.

AC: So don't you think we could say that ideally, from a certain point of view, if that letting go was occurring on the deeper or more universal layers of being, automatically there would be a liberation from the compulsive fixation on the personal—because in that experience of deeper letting go, there would be a simultaneous recognition of the ultimate unreality and emptiness of the personal fixation and all the suffering that it creates?

JE: Again, it just doesn't seem to work that way. If you look at what the Theravada Buddhist tradition, for instance, claims happens when one has gone to the end, then yes, what it describes as the final outcome of spiritual practice is that all forms of self-generated suffering end, including personal suffering. But one of the things I've always found very credible in the Theravada tradition is that you don't get full freedom all at once. It comes by stages or increments. There are four different experiences of enlightenment. And the earliest stages are still compatible with a lot of personal meshugas [craziness] and ways in which we can still create problems for ourselves and others. So the ground shifts, and the relationship to self and to experience shifts. But it doesn't shift completely and all at once.

In these four experiences of enlightenment, the path to each is basically the same, but what's different are the "fetters" or the samyojanas that are extinguished in each enlightenment experience. These fetters are the root sources of inner suffering, and a different set of fetters is extinguished in each one of the four enlightenment experiences—extinguished irreversibly, permanently, according to the testimony of practitioners. No therapist, incidentally, would ever claim changes in therapy are irreversible! The progression in extinguishing these fetters fascinates me as a psychologist. The first set of fetters that are extinguished are basically cognitive in nature—what a cognitive psychologist would call "maladaptive cognitions" or "core beliefs." In extinguishing these misguided beliefs about who we are, our basic understanding and perspective changes. But simply extinguishing basic beliefs and assumptions doesn't automatically shift the underlying motivations, impulses and emotions that can still drive us to act in ways that create suffering. Cognitively, we may relate to our experience differently, yet we can continue to act in the same neurotic ways. Not to the same extent, perhaps, but basically we can still find ourselves acting in unskillful ways that create a lot of problems. The second set of fetters reaches deeper into the psyche, into the affective or motivational bases of behavior. Motivations, impulses and affects are much more difficult to shift than cognitions and beliefs. The last set of fetters is extinguished at the fourth and final stage of enlightenment. The core of this group is called mana or "conceit." This is a remnant of the tendency to compare self with others—the root of narcissism. The last fetters really have to do with rooting out the final residues of narcissistic attachment to self from the mind. And that's more difficult to shift than the affective or motivational bases of behavior.

The same progression happens in therapy. Cognitions, beliefs, perspectives change first. Core drives, motivations and impulses are much harder to change. Hardest of all to change is narcissistic investment in the self. So when you say that ideally the realization of emptiness should free one from personal neurotic problems, I don't think it's that simple. I think the shifts take place in stages. What the tradition describes and what we've learned in therapy are exactly the same progression. That shift doesn't take place all at once.

I was reading something the other day in Philip Kapleau Roshi's book Zen Dawn in the West. A student asks him a similar question about kensho, and Kapleau replies, "Kensho doesn't eliminate character. If anything, kensho makes character failings more obvious." He's talking about his own experience and his experience with his students. But he's also talking about the first experience of kensho. The Zen tradition has always said there can be little kensho and great kensho. The opening can be small or it can be large, but it's still just a first glimpse of enlightenment. My teacher, Anagarika Munindra, used to call it "a little bit of enlightenment." That first glimpse doesn't shift everything.

AC: My last question is: Do you think that the Buddha would have been a better teacher if he had undergone psychotherapy and had Western psychotherapeutic training?

JE: Oh, how to answer that? The answer is no. The Buddha did both spiritual and personal work for eons, if you believe the stories. So what we see in this one lifetime is just a teeny tip of the iceberg of what went into his realization. And how much you want to conclude from that is risky. But he wasn't addressing directly the kind of problems that people bring into therapy. People would bring those kinds of problems to him occasionally, their different kinds of unhappiness. But the level on which he addressed them was very different than the level on which a therapist would address them.

AC: But my question is, do you think the Buddha would have been a better teacher if he'd undergone psychotherapy and had Western therapeutic training? Transpersonal theory suggests that the Eastern enlightenment teachings presume a certain level of psychological health and development or ego strength as a prerequisite for spiritual practice, and that the Eastern teachings don't really have any knowledge or understanding about the earlier stages of childhood and ego development. The criticism is that the Eastern teachings alone are insufficient to address many of the emotional and psychological needs that a lot of people have because they are simply not taken into account. So if this is true, we could say that obviously in the Buddhist teaching, this dimension of ego or self-development isn't really addressed. Are you saying that in spite of that, you feel that the Buddha wouldn't have been a better teacher, that there was nothing missing from his teaching?

JE: If the Buddha had been born in Brooklyn, like all enlightened teachers these days, it would seem to be a prerequisite. If he had been born in Brooklyn, then I would say that if he had some experience of psychotherapy, it would probably help him to teach Western students! But he was a man of his time and his culture, and that wasn't necessary. Those personal issues were handled by other roles in the society—whether it was shamans or rainmakers or midwives or whoever. It wasn't that there was no one around to address them.

But the Buddha himself had no need for psychotherapy. Not everybody needs psychotherapy. God help us!