Jack Engler Interview, 'The 1001 Forms of Self-Grasping'

introduction

Jack Engler is one of the pioneers of transpersonal theory, a relatively new way of thinking about human development in which Western psychological theory meets Eastern enlightenment philosophy. He is a practicing psychotherapist who also teaches Theravada Buddhist "mindfulness" meditation and Buddhist psychology. He is also the man who made the by-now famous declaration: "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody." His statement has become a catchphrase in much of the Western Buddhist world and almost a commandment among transpersonal psychologists and theorists. Because enlightenment is traditionally understood to be about the death of the ego, I wanted to ask this psychologist who is deeply steeped in Buddhist practice and philosophy what he meant when he originally made that statement back in 1981.

Engler's journey on the contemplative path began at age sixteen, when he read The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton's autobiography. This initiated a long and winding adventure that took him from the University of Notre Dame to Benedictine and Trappist monasteries in Europe to Thomas Merton's monastery in Kentucky. After Merton's strong discouragement of Engler's inclination toward the monastic life, he pursued novitiate training with the intention of becoming a university chaplain and professor and continued further academic study in England and Germany, where he got a degree in theology. He then went to Oxford to get a doctorate in biblical studies. Reaching an impasse in his personal, intellectual and academic quest, he experienced what he called a "personal crisis—a personal and spiritual dead end." He returned to America in 1969, became a social activist and then began teaching religious studies. He eventually made a decision to "start graduate work all over again" in psychology and religion at the University of Chicago, where he got his M.A. and Ph.D. He came to the end of his search when, one day, he entered the Vivekananda Vedanta Society bookstore in Chicago. Driving by the small bookshop and knowing nothing about Vedanta, he said, "Something prompted me to just jam on my brakes and go inside." In the back of the store he found a copy of The Heart of Buddhist Meditation by Nyanaponika Thera. "I got about thirty pages into it," he said, "and I knew that I had found what I had been looking for all my life. It was instantaneous." For his doctoral dissertation, he devised a research project that would take him to India to study Buddhist psychology and practice meditation. While there he spent time studying at the Nalanda Institute and did extensive research with practitioners from the Calcutta Buddhist community, many of whom he described as having reached "at least the first stage of enlightenment." The data he compiled from this research was groundbreaking, endeavoring to "establish cross-cultural validation of the psychological changes at each major stage" of Buddhist meditation practice. Upon his return to America, his aspirations changed, and he decided that rather than remain in academia, he would go into clinical practice because, he said, "I had finally seen not only my own suffering but everybody else's. India just profoundly changed me that way."

Is it true, as transpersonal therapists like Jack Engler advocate, that Buddhist meditation and Western psychotherapy work together to liberate the different levels of self that make up a human being? Is it true that "personal issues" need to be addressed in a more personal, therapeutic framework, whereas the deeper and more profound dimensions of letting go occur on the meditation cushion? Is it true that enlightenment experiences usually do not liberate the self from the effects of childhood trauma or attachment to the personal and fundamental narcissistic tendencies? Are the transpersonal therapists correct when they assert that there is no fundamental contradiction between a psychology that endeavors to heal the ego and a spiritual teaching that encourages us to abandon it?

I looked forward to meeting the man who said that "you have to be somebody before you can be nobody" because for a long time I have wondered if that statement was really true. Was it really true that you have to be somebody before you can be nobody?—that one needs, as the transpersonal therapists say, to have a strong ego, a strong sense of self, before one would have the kind of confidence necessary to take that mysterious leap into the unknown? From my own experience as a spiritual teacher, I have found without exception that if enlightenment is the context and the goal of the spiritual quest, then allowing any room whatsoever for the endless needs, pains, anxieties and frustrations of the narcissistic ego always has only one outcome: giving air, water and food to that which, in the spiritual experience, is recognized to be completely unreal. I was curious to know why the transpersonal therapists never seemed to see things as that black-and-white. Indeed, Engler's declaration has become so widely accepted as a truism in most spiritual circles these days that I wondered whether his words were being used by some teachers, students and therapists alike at times to avoid the potentially overwhelming implications of having to step beyond the ego entirely in order to experience directly what enlightenment is all about. But first, I needed to ask him what his definition of ego is from his perspective as a psychotherapist as well as his perspective as a proponent of Buddhist enlightenment teachings.

interview

Andrew Cohen: How would you define the word "ego" in your role as a psychologist? And how would you define the word "ego" in your role as a teacher of Buddhist psychology and meditation?

Jack Engler: In the psychoanalytic tradition, ego has a very positive connotation. It's a collective designation for a whole set of very important psychological functions. Functions from thinking to feeling to reality testing—a whole set of capacities that are essential to human life. And very often people have deficits in these different areas of functioning. In therapy, one thing you're trying to do is develop what's traditionally called "ego strength." As a psychologist, part of my effort is to help people develop capacities that may be underdeveloped or may have been derailed earlier in development or may have been compromised by subsequent trauma. So ego, in this sense, is a positive thing. That's the way I think of it in psychology.

But a lot of people who come to me for therapy don't think of ego that way. They think of ego in a spiritual context, where it's a bad thing. But talking about ego in a spiritual context, to me, is even more problematic. It gets talked about almost like it's an alternate personality within me that is bad; it gets reified as some part of me that I have to battle with, that I have to transcend. I think spiritual language reinforces a lot of dualistic thinking when we talk about ego that way—unless we're really careful in how we define it. Now instead of "self versus other" it's "self versus ego." And so the struggle just continues in another guise.

If you ask me what I think ego is in a spiritual sense, I guess I would say it's our attempt to grasp ourselves. It's the myriad forms of self-grasping that are doomed to endless frustration and disappointment. I think that's the root of what ego is, and everything else follows from this, whether it's preoccupation with self-image or whether it's attempts at self-aggrandizement or whether it's experiencing self as separate and over/against others. The core of it seems to be this attempt to grasp the self and fix it. Or fixate it, that's a better word. And where does the self-grasping come from? I think it mostly comes out of fear, out of this core, chronic, anxious sense that we don't exist in the way we think we do.

AC: In our research for this issue, we've basically boiled it down to two very rough definitions of ego. In the first definition, the psychological definition, it's really neutral in nature, not positive or negative: ego as the self-organizing principle.

JE: Well, to me, that's positive. Because we need a certain amount of self-organization.

AC: Okay. So we could say that ego in this sense is positive and would be the self-organizing principle that obviously has to be in fairly good working order if one is going to be able to do any serious spiritual practice. And just to put it in a simple way, the other definition of ego is negative, which we're roughly calling "narcissism."

JE: Mark Epstein used that term, too, in his book Thoughts without a Thinker. I hesitate to call it narcissism unless you distinguish between narcissism in a clinical psychological context and narcissism as it's understood at the deeper spiritual level because they're not exactly the same. I don't want to reduce what I think is the very deepest level of spiritual insight to a narcissistic personality disorder.

AC: Yes, it's much bigger than that.

JE: There is a core narcissism that is much more universal and much deeper, which underlies all personality structure. So if we're talking about narcissism in that sense, then I would agree with your definition.

AC: So from the spiritual perspective, we could say that that would be, in essence, what the ego is. Whether it's termed "ego" or the so-called obstacle to enlightenment.

JE: Well, yes, but as I said, I think of it more as self-grasping. To me, self-grasping is a more dynamic, experiential way to describe it. And you can see that in working with people and asking them to observe the moment-to-moment workings of their mind. You can help them identify all the thousand and one forms of the attempt to grasp the self.

AC: Could you define the different aims and goals of psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation with regard to the ego?

JE: I don't see them as inherently different. I just think they work at different levels of mind, at different levels of experience. But the goal is still freedom from suffering, freedom from our inner blocks, freedom from those stuck places where we try to grasp at ourselves or where we become so afraid that we turn back in some way and contract around whatever it is we're trying to protect. In that sense the goal is the same. The path is also very similar. It's what we do when we sit down on a cushion or we look into our teacher's eyes: We're trying to see a clearer reflection of ourselves and face whatever it is that's unfaceable. In therapy it's the same thing: It's meeting a person where they are and then helping them go where they don't necessarily want to go—to see particularly the ways in which they may be contributing to their own suffering, and asking them to look at that. So in principle I don't see a difference. It's just a different level of experience that they're working on. The goal and the method in the broader sense are very similar, very complementary. And I think they're not even linear. But I used to think they were linear—that you do one and then you do the other.

AC: You are well-known for your statement, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody."

JE: Yes, well, I don't see it as quite that linear or exclusive anymore.

AC: Then could you please explain what you originally meant?

JE: In a general way, I would still stand by it—that you have to be somebody before you can be nobody, although it's a provocative way of putting it. What I had in mind when making that statement was that if you are going to go to the depths of Buddhist mindfulness practice, which I was talking about, it requires certain psychological capacities, what in the psychoanalytic tradition would be called certain basic "ego strengths." And those ego strengths form around some stable sense of who you are, some stable sense of identity. And I still believe that's true.

AC: The essence of the statement "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" seems to be that unless one has developed a healthy sense of self-confidence and unless one has a fairly stable sense of oneself, you're saying that it's going to be difficult for that individual to begin to practice mindfulness meditation in the kind of way that's actually going to be able to liberate them.

JE: No, just about anyone can do basic mindfulness practice and derive some benefit from it, unless they're in some kind of acute mental state in which thoughts and feelings are just too disorganized and too chaotic—because then asking a person to look inward and be aware moment to moment of their thoughts and feelings would simply be too overwhelming, it would become a regressive or fragmenting experience. But short of those kinds of states, I believe anyone can benefit from basic mindfulness practice. So I wasn't addressing basic practice then. I was really talking about going to the depths of practice, particularly those experiences of enlightenment that the Vipassana tradition talks about. What those higher stages of practice require is considerable ego strengths. For instance, a basic ego strength is the capacity to tolerate aversive feelings and emotions without becoming undone by them—what in psychology is called "affect tolerance." That's what I had in mind, that kind of thing.

One of the main things I was responding to, though, when I wrote that article was something I had seen in myself and was seeing in a lot of people I was working with, which was an attempt to use meditation practice to do an "end run" around normal tasks of human development.

AC: What do you mean by "end run"?

JE: Thinking that spiritual practice alone can substitute for normal psychological development; that somehow by going deep in practice and getting enlightened, that's going to solve all the nagging neurotic problems that have continued to plague one. So, "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" was also meant as a cautionary statement to pay attention to all basic tasks, not just spiritual ones.

AC: You felt that people were trying to avoid facing certain parts of themselves by focusing their attention exclusively on enlightenment and spiritual practice?

JE: That's right. So the intent of my statement was to address that issue. But then, in that article, I tried to elaborate it further in terms of a linear developmental model. I wouldn't do that in the same way today because now I think our spiritual life and our psychological life are much more interwoven. I think the statement still has value in the way I originally meant it, but I would take it out of this tight psychological model of human development where we first have to develop a sense of self and then we will be able to see through the illusion of self.

AC: So in other words, development doesn't have an absolute or rigid structure. You're saying now that the strengthening of the ego in the positive sense—as this organizing principle—and the questioning of its ultimate validity could occur simultaneously?

JE: People who are doing a lot of spiritual practice and who don't have much experience with therapy think that therapy somehow inevitably strengthens self-grasping or ego. But my experience with therapy, when it's successful and done well, is that it does just the opposite. It doesn't bring you to the point of seeing through the inherent illusion of seeing yourself as a separate entity, and it doesn't bring you to the kind of total freedom that spiritual practice promises. That's clear. And it doesn't pretend to. But if it's done well and it's successful, I think it really does relativize the way you hold yourself. You don't hold yourself so tightly and you're not so wedded to concepts of who you are. It begins to loosen up all your fixed ideas of self and in that way can contribute to growth in spiritual practice also. So I don't see one as tightening the ego and the other as loosening it. I see them both working in the same direction. And I see it much more as an interweaving of personal work and spiritual work. It's just that therapy doesn't take it to the depth that spiritual practice does.

AC: Could you please explain what you mean when you say that our evolution, for lack of a better word, is a combination of personal and spiritual work? What do you mean by one, and what do you mean by the other?

JE: Well, personal work has to do with our own individual life history, our own individual narrative, and whatever unfinished business we're carrying from that. It has to do with personality and social functioning, relationship issues, work issues. These issues come up in Buddhist mindfulness practice—and probably from time to time in all practices. The different traditions work with them in different ways, and some don't work with them at all. Zen doesn't, for instance. And that's fine for the goals that Zen sets itself. The ultimate spiritual goals don't have to do so much with personality and personal functioning. They have to do with liberation from all those deep-rooted causes of suffering in the mind—in all of our minds. These universal causes of self-generated suffering—fear, greed, anger, self-deception, shame, doubt—get filtered and expressed through personality and personal history, but they exert an influence at a level prior to their elaboration in individual behavior. They are universal; they're not unique to any one particular individual.

But facing universal issues means facing personal and particular issues. As I've understood it in my own work and as I've seen it in clients who come to me for therapy as well as students in the meditation hall, it basically means, in the simplest possible way, facing whatever we haven't been able to face. Spiritual practice demands that we do that in one way, and personal work and therapy demand we do it in another. To the extent that anything hasn't been faced, it's going to continue to plague us and cause problems for ourselves and others.

AC: Absolutely.

JE: So, in a general way, that's how I understand the interweaving of personal and spiritual work. It's continuing to uncover the blocks, the resistances, the ways in which we cause suffering to ourselves and others.

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!