by Harris, Dan
That phrase—“the wisdom of insecurity”—really struck me. It was the perfect rejoinder to my “price of security” motto. It made me see my work worries in an entirely different light. If there was no such thing as security, then why bother with the insecurity?
For 2,500 years, the Buddhists had been comprehensively mapping the mind—that tasteless, odorless, formless thing (or, more accurately, no-thing) through which we experience our entire lives. They compiled meticulous lists: The Three Characteristics of All Phenomena, The Four Noble Truths, The Four Highest Emotions, The Seven Factors of Enlightenment, etc. They also came up with names for so many of the mental habits I’d come to notice in myself, such as “comparing mind,” and “wanting mind.” They had a term, too, for that thing I did where something would bother me and I would immediately project forward to an unpleasant future (e.g., Balding → Unemployment → Flophouse). The Buddhists called this prapañca (pronounced pra-PUN-cha), which roughly translates to “proliferation,” or “the imperialistic tendency of mind.” That captured it beautifully, I thought: something happens, I worry, and that concern instantaneously colonizes my future. My favorite Buddhist catchphrase, however, was the one they used to describe the churning of the ego: “monkey mind.” I’ve always been a sucker for animal metaphors, and I thought this one was perfect. Our minds are like furry little gibbons: always agitated, never at rest.
As compelling as the Buddhist view was for me, though, it once again threw me back up against the same old questions I’d been wrestling with since the days of Eckhart Tolle. Wasn’t the Buddhist emphasis on “letting go” a recipe for passivity? Was the denigration of desire another way of saying we shouldn’t bother to strive? Furthermore, shouldn’t we be “attached” to our loved ones?
There were other things I did not get. If Buddhism was about being happier, why was the Buddha’s signature declaration “Life is suffering”? Then, of course, there was still the issue of enlightenment. The Buddha’s claim—which, as far as I could tell, modern Buddhists, including Dr. Epstein, still believed—was that it was possible to achieve “the end of suffering,” to reach Nirvana. I couldn’t very well mock Tolle for his claims of “spiritual awakening” and give the Buddhists a pass on enlightenment.
Notwithstanding my confusion, the more I learned about the 2,500-year-old historical figure known to me previously as a lawn ornament, the more intrigued I grew. I felt like I was finally onto something truly substantial. This wasn’t just the doctrine of one weird German dude, but an ancient tradition that was given serious credence by smart people like Epstein. My hitherto haphazard quest suddenly felt infinitely more directed.
Right in the middle of our wedding reception, I decided to make a conscious effort to put everything I was learning about Buddhism to work. Dinner had been served and consumed, and the dancing was under way. That’s when we heard it: the swell of horns in the distance. Marching in were about eight Bahamians, all dressed in elaborate local costumes and playing trumpets, trombones, tubas, and drums. It was what islanders call a “Junkanoo Rush.” It took me a minute to recognize the song, U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Perhaps not the best sentiment for a wedding, I thought. But never mind: the music was beautiful, and our guests were going wild. I grabbed Bianca, who was looking incandescent in her dress, and we formed a conga line behind the band. I was fully present, totally in the moment. No clinging: I knew this wouldn’t last and I was wringing every bit of pleasure out of it while I could.
I had always kind of assumed that I might not enjoy my own wedding. These events were all about the bride, I thought; the groom was just supposed to stand there, smiling. I also feared that after a lifetime of avoiding commitment, I would experience some significant last-minute jitters. As usual, my powers of prognostication were completely off. It turned out to be the best weekend of my life.
Admittedly, this was a hard place to be unhappy. We were getting married on Harbour Island, a magical spot where most people drove around in golf carts instead of cars, and where free-range chickens were given right-of-way in the streets.
The wedding was a small affair: just fifty people, our nuclear families and our closest friends. Everyone came for three days. During the day, people lounged on the beach, where the sand was literally pink, and every night we threw a party. Instead of the usual flybys that most newlyweds do on receiving lines and at guests’ tables, Bianca and I got plenty of face time with everyone.
I was also buoyed by my confidence that I was making the right decision. I couldn’t imagine marrying anyone other than Bianca. As my friend Regina had quipped, “For a person with terrible judgment, you did a great job with the most important decision of your life.”
But there was something else at work here, too. My consumption of Buddhist books was paying off. Throughout the weekend, I made a deliberate effort to pause, look around, and savor things while they lasted. There were little moments, like running errands for Bianca—for example, putting her carefully curated gift bags in people’s rooms—and actually enjoying it. Or when I babysat my adorable, big-eyed baby niece Campbell in my room while everyone else was out having lunch. She sat on my lap and cooed contentedly while I ate a cheeseburger, trying not to drip ketchup on her head.
There were big moments, too, like the ceremony itself, where I watched Bianca walk down the aisle and wondered how I’d gotten so lucky.
As soon as I got back home from the honeymoon, though, my penchant for worry reasserted itself—provoked by a conundrum at work that I simply could not figure out how to handle in a Buddhist way.
One Friday evening, I looked up at the TV in my office and saw David Muir anchoring World News—the weekday version, the Big Show. He was doing a fantastic job, which threw me into a Triple Lindy of “comparing mind,” “monkey mind,” and prapañca. Muir is kicking ass right now. I’m going down.
I was feeling bad—and then, on top of that, feeling bad about feeling bad. I liked the guy, after all. This incident again crystallized all of my nagging questions about Buddhism. Doesn’t competitiveness serve a useful purpose? Is the “price of security” simply incompatible with the “wisdom of insecurity”?
It was time for me to play my trump card. Despite the fact that more than 50 percent of Americans tell pollsters they don’t trust the media, generally speaking, people return our calls. I found Mark Epstein’s office number and left him a message saying I was a reporter and also a fan. I asked if he’d be willing to meet up, and he called me back right away to say he was game.
So, about a week later, roughly eight months after I’d first discovered Eckhart Tolle, I took a cab downtown for my man-date with the Buddhist shrink at the Tribeca Grand, just a few blocks from his office—the same chichi hotel where I’d stayed in the days after 9/11.
It was an oddly cool spot for two guys meeting to discuss Eastern spirituality. When I arrived, Epstein was already at the bar, located in the atrium, with seven floors looming overhead. He’d aged a bit since the picture on the back of his books, but I still recognized him, and he still looked considerably younger than his fifty-five years. His hair, which he wore combed back, was graying, but his hairline was robustly intact. (I notice these things.) He was about my height and lean, wearing a slightly oversized blazer with a T-shirt underneath. He greeted me warmly, with a voice that had a soft quality to it, perhaps the product of decades in a confined space, discussing people’s most private and painful issues.
After the preliminaries—the ordering of beers, my annoying habit of telling anyone who has a medical degree about the educational pedigrees of my wife and parents—we got down to business.
Conditioned as I was by my time with the self-help gurus, I started by asking Epstein flat out whether his life had been radically and grandly transformed by his embrace of Buddhism. For a nanosecond he looked at me like I was crazy, but then he caught himself. He didn’t quite laugh at me; he was too polite for that. Instead, he explained that he, like everyon
e else, got sad, angry, obsessive, you name it—the entire range of emotions, negative and positive.
“Are you always able to stay in the moment?”
“Eh, I try to remain aware of my surroundings,” he said, but he admitted he didn’t always succeed.
I pushed him on some of the Buddhist metaphysics. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked.
“It’s nice,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. This was not a dogmatic individual.
It hit me that what I had on my hands here was a previously undiscovered species: a normal human being. Epstein, it appeared to me, was the anti-Tolle, the anti-Chopra. Not a guru in the popular sense of the word, just a regular guy with whom I was having a drink on a Friday night.
We started to talk about his background. He, too, had grown up in the Boston area. His dad was also a doctor. He didn’t have some fancy backstory, à la Tolle or Chopra. No sudden, late-night spiritual awakening, no hearing of voices. He’d discovered Buddhism after signing up for an Introduction to World Religion course during his freshman year in college because a girl he liked was also in the class. His fling with the girl didn’t last (although he did end up dating her roommate), but he did develop an immediate and abiding interest in the dharma, which resonated with him after a lifelong struggle with feelings of emptiness and unreality, and questions about whether he really mattered.
I explained to him that I was drawn to Buddhism for the exact opposite reasons. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who appeared on television for a living, the question of whether I mattered had never occurred to me. I did not struggle, as Mark did, with feelings of being empty or unreal. “On the contrary,” I said, only half-jokingly, “I feel all too real. I still kinda have a residual suspicion from childhood that the whole world is laid out for my benefit and nothing happens out of my line of sight. Does that place me at a disadvantage in terms of being a Buddhist?”
He thought this was hilarious. “Absolutely not,” he said, laughing. “Your personality and mine are really different. When I’m thinking about it, it’s from a much more introverted place. You’re talking from an extroverted place. There’s an energy there, an enthusiasm there, a rambunctiousness there.” Buddhism, he said, could be helpful for both personality types.
I asked what a beginner should do to get deeper into this world. I didn’t want to be a Buddhist, per se; I just wanted to better manage my ego. He told me how, after that initial religion class at Harvard, he had fallen in with a bunch of young people who were also interested in Eastern spirituality. Many of these people had gone on to become influential teachers and writers, who’d helped popularize the dharma in America. He suggested I read some of their books, and he started ticking off names. As I madly typed notes into my BlackBerry for future reference, it was impossible not to notice that nearly all of these names were Jewish: Goldstein, Goleman, Kornfield, Salzberg. “This is a whole subculture,” he said. The little cabal even had a nickname: the “Jew-Bus.”
It sounded like a remarkable group. They had all met at elite Northeast universities and also while taking exotic, druggy romps through the subcontinent. Mark theorized that many of these young Jewish people, having been raised in secular environments, felt a spiritual hole in their lives. He also acknowledged that the Jewish penchant for anxiety probably played a role in their collective attraction to Buddhism. Over the ensuing decades, the Jew-Bus had been a major force in figuring out how to translate the wisdom of the East for a Western audience—mostly by making it less hierarchical and devotional. Mark mentioned that he and some of his peers taught Buddhist-themed seminars around town, where they gave talks and answered questions. “Go to some events,” he advised, “until you get bored.”
I laughed. I liked this guy. This man whose picture I had reflexively rejected turned out to be somebody with whom I could see myself being friends. We were a bit of an odd pair, to be sure, but there was a certain compatibility, too. He was a professional listener; I was a professional talker. We both had the whole Boston–New York–Jewish cultural affinity thing. He didn’t feel foreign, like Tolle and Chopra. He could have been one of my uncles. I wanted to be his friend, but what I really wanted was to figure out how to get what he appeared to have. Not some self-conscious, allegedly unbreakable equanimity, but a quiet confidence, an easy charm. There was no denial of his neuroses; he seemed to find them amusing rather than enervating.
Normally at this point in the conversation—at least with a Tolle or a Chopra—I’d have been asking for practical advice and in return getting a blizzard of nonanswers. Mark, however, had a very explicit prescription. This is where the Buddhists diverged quite dramatically from self-help: They had an actual, practical program. It wasn’t expensive gimcrackery. No spendy seminars, no credit cards required. It was totally free. It was a radical internal jujitsu move that was supposed to allow you to face the asshole in your head directly, and peacefully disarm him. Problem was, I found what they were proposing to be repellent.
Chapter 6
The Power of Negative Thinking
My abiding distaste for anything associated with hippies or the New Age dates back to the mid-1970s when I was about five years old. My parents, still not having sloughed off the cultural residue of the Age of Aquarius, sent me to a children’s yoga class at a local elementary school. I showed up wearing Toughskins, the indestructible children’s jeans that had been recently introduced by Sears. The teacher, who looms in my memory like an airy-fairy praying mantis, pronounced my pants to be insufficiently flexible for the exercises we’d be doing. In front of all the other little kids, she made me strip down and do sun salutations in my tighty-whities.
My early childhood traumas—which also included compulsory camping trips and visits to musty health food stores—were compounded by my years at Colby College, a small liberal arts school in central Maine, where I was repeatedly forced to listen to Jerry Garcia’s interminable guitar noodling by hacky sack–playing, do-rag- and Teva-wearing Deadheads from the suburbs of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
All of which left me in a tricky position vis-à-vis Buddhism. Epstein et al. argued that the only way to tame the monkey mind, to truly glimpse impermanence and defeat our habitual tendency toward clinging, was to meditate—and I had absolutely no intention of following their advice. Meditation struck me as the distillation of everything that sucked hardest about the granola lifestyle. I pictured myself seated in an unbearable cross-legged position (my disavowal of yoga having left me less limber than I would have liked) in a room that smelled like feet, with a group of smug “practitioners” ringing bells, ogling crystals, intoning om, and attempting to float off into some sort of cosmic goo. My attitude was summed up nicely by Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, who said, “Meditation is a waste of time, like learning French or kissing after sex.”
Compounding my resistance was my extremely limited attention span. (Another of the many reasons I went into TV.) I assumed there was no way my particular mind—whirring at best, at worst a whirlwind—could ever stop thinking.
This stalemate between the dharma and me might have dragged on indefinitely, but then a month after my man-date with Epstein, I happened to go see my shrink. I was reluctant to tell Dr. Brotman about my budding interest in Buddhism because, like me, he had an aversion to sloppy sentimentality; it’s part of why we were simpatico. But when I fessed up, he responded by telling me about a former colleague of his from Harvard who had written a bestselling book about the health benefits of meditation. Brotman seemed to think it might do me some good.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not for me,” I said. Then, as I sat there absorbing his surprising response, I recalled aloud how, on the first day we met, he had used an animal analogy to explain how someone like me needed to not only refrain from drugs but also engage in careful mental and physical upkeep in order to stay balanced.
“When you say you think meditation might be good for me, is that because of the time you told me I needed to trea
t myself like a stallion?”
He started laughing and shaking his head. “I never said stallion. I said thoroughbred.”
Whatever: semantics. I went ahead and read the book he was referring to by Brotman’s friend. The doctor’s theory was that, in modern life, our ancient fight-or-flight mechanism was being triggered too frequently—in traffic jams, meetings with our bosses, etc.—and that this was contributing to the epidemic of heart disease. Even if the confrontations were themselves minor, our bodies didn’t know that; they reacted as if they were in kill-or-be-killed scenarios, releasing toxic stress chemicals into the bloodstream. The doctor had done studies showing that meditation could reverse the effects of stress and lower blood pressure—which the hypochondriac in me found deeply appealing.
I then read a few books about what Buddhist meditation actually involved, and learned that you didn’t need to wear robes, chant Sanskrit phrases, or listen to Cat Stevens. Perhaps my attitude on this matter was yet another example of my reaching hasty conclusions. My resistance was starting to crack.
Saint Paul, the notorious murderer of Christians, had a conversion experience on the road to Damascus. Nixon, the devout anti-Communist, electrified the world by traveling to China. The sudden renunciation of everything one has previously stood for is a well-established part of the human repertoire. Mine came in a stolen moment on the floor of a beach house.
It was the last weekend in August, and Bianca and I were sharing a big, old, converted barn with a group of friends. The people we were leasing it from, a pair of retired college professors, had rather idiosyncratically decorated the place with antique farm equipment, including sickles, axes, and pitchforks, which were hanging precariously from the rafters and from pretty much every inch of wall space. In addition to the elaborate arrays of saws, scissors, and hammers, there was a barrel filled with wooden rakes.