Lighting The Way Worldwide

Western culture has become very cozy with selfishness and self-centeredness, even to the point of making them a virtue. We always hear admonitions like “Take care of yourself first,” or “Just tell yourself that you deserve it.” In contrast to our self-absorbed, Western approach to life, Zen Buddhist and psychiatrist Barry Magid writes,

“Zen, on the other hand, is more likely [than psychoanalysis] to directly confront and challenge the old patterns or organizing principles that constitute our self-centeredness. The difficulties inherent in Zen practice (the emotional and physical stress of long hours of sitting), and the conceptual quandaries that arise by having our usual frame of reference radically challenged by the seeming incomprehensibility of a nondualist, nonessentialist perspective as encapsulated in koans, all combine to undermine preexisting modes of organizing and mastering experience.” (Buddhadharma, Winter 2007, 51)

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Louis Nordstrom was a Zen master and is now an instructor at Hunter College. Nevertheless, childhood abuse, neglect, and abandonment that led him into psychotherapy, through which he finally realized that,

He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself [to Zen “selflessness”]. If he wasn’t there [as a distinct person] in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity. (Chip Brown, “How a Zen Mater Found the Light (Again),” New York Times Magazine, April 26, 2009, 38.)

Nordstrom came to realize that instead of engaging reality, Zen offered him one of many means of denying reality and his feelings. His “conversion” was a matter of re-discovering his rejected self, however uncomfortable this might be. In his autobiography, Nordstrom wrote:

I’ve come to a point in my life where survival requires that I reclaim my narrative by refusing any longer to dismiss experience that was profoundly painful… (38).

His conversion involved acknowledging his self-deceptions:

His new insights were mostly a matter of intellectually understanding the way he used Zen to assuage the pain of the past, hiding the pathological aspects of self-abandonment and neglect in the rapture of Zen vacancy; how he hid from his own neediness, anger and grief…(38) 

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