When meditation was introduced to the West, it came to us through two sources: Language translations of Eastern spiritual texts and Asian teachers who came to the West to share their wisdom. As someone who speaks several languages fluently, I can attest to the fact that different languages aren’t simply different ways of saying the same thing. It’s common to think that language just reflects reality and so a foreign language expresses that reality but uses different words. However, linguists have studied this extensively, and have discovered that language doesn’t reflect reality; it creates it. Reality isn’t a pre-existing set of facts we perceive and describe with words; it’s a perceptual process we create through our inner senses and language-making capacity.
I learned this first-hand when I lived in Switzerland. I became fluent in Swiss German and discovered that there are German words that don’t exist in English. You can try to fudge a translation but it’s always wrong in some way. How could this be? How can there be a word in one language that doesn’t exist in another? The reason is that the perception doesn’t exist. If I have a certain experience and have a word to describe it but you have no access to that experience you won’t have a word for it. You might be able to use a lot of words to hint at the experience but if it’s something you’ve never even touched on in your life and have no awareness of it, you won’t have language to express it.
Language translation is much more complex, nuanced, and fraught with errors than you might imagine. There’s a crazy story of a meeting between the Americans and Russians during a summit in Geneva during the cold war. The American translator said something that angered the Russians but he didn’t understand why. Turned out he had translated one word wrong—a word which changed the original term from a harmless verb into a threatening communication. Luckily, another bilingual person helped them clear it up. One wrong translation and we might not be here today!
When translating Eastern languages to Western languages, especially English, there are incredibly complex analyses one needs to make. Eastern languages are far more different from English than are our cousins, the Romance languages of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. If you speak Spanish or French, for example, you know how similar they are to English. German, which comes from a different branch of Indo-European languages from English, is a bit more difficult to learn because of its different sounds and grammar. But Asian languages are in a whole different dimension!
For example, Japanese and Chinese don’t distinguish between singular and plural unless it’s absolutely necessary. So, the word for one cat is the same as the word for many cats. They also have no verb tenses; to say that you’ll run, or already ran, or are running now is all the same. There are no articles, like, “a” or “an” or “the.” And these are the minor differences. They don’t even use an alphabet like we do; they use characters that convey meanings. To speak the language, you have to know at least 3-4000 of them, and there are literally tens of thousands.
Indian languages have a whole other set of attributes that make it totally foreign to an English speaker. Furthermore, Asian languages often have many more meanings for one word than we do in English. Add this to the fact that their cultural and psychological realities are quite different from ours, and it becomes difficult to figure out exactly what a word means without a highly specific context.
There are two language translations, in particular, that are so bad they’ve given Westerners a false and counter-productive idea of mindfulness meditation and how to practice it. The first bad translation is the word, “mind.” Because Westerners tend to associate the mind with thinking, we assume that’s what Buddhists, Hindus, and Taoists mean when they used the word. But if you know anything about Asian languages you know that the words which have been translated into English as “mind” don’t mean “thinking”!
It’s a bit different in each Asian language but the commonality is that “mind” means a way of feeling, heart, spirit, essence, psyche, vitality, vigor, a state of being and other renderings that refer to your mood and state of awareness. It doesn’t mean having thoughts! Yes, thinking is a part of the mind they’re talking about but only a minor aspect.
The result is that many Westerners who follow Eastern teachings and practices mistakenly think that their purpose is to quiet their thinking. A whole self-help subculture has grown up around this idea. I recently watched a BBC special on Buddhism which said the purpose of meditation is “to still the mind,” which basically means, “don’t think so much.”
This is not the original purpose of mindfulness meditation. It’s the Western mistaken notion of it. Don’t get me wrong; even the bad translation is useful. It helps you build cognitive space between your awareness and your emotions which cuts way down on pain and reactivity. But it’s the wrong translation.
The original texts state that the aim of meditation is to be aware of, and observe your inner life to the point of transcending the illusions you live under. This, in turn, is said to free your heart from it’s constrictions and connect you to the deeper reality of life, death, nature, and humanity. The purpose isn’t to get rid of anything, ie. too much thinking.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this garbage about how thinking is bad, overthinking is your problem, thinking is the devil! Of course, the folks teaching this write books with volumes of thoughts about how to get rid of your thoughts and they give lectures with reams of ideas about how ideas are bad, inferior, unimportant, neurotic, and pathological. It’s a self-refuting concept because the more you explain it, the more you demonstrate its falseness.
Think about it: Do you really want to live in a world where people don’t think much? We’d have no science, no technology, no modern medicine, no modern transportation or communication systems…no guitar amps! We’d be a society of zoned out zombies with no creativity and no ability to engage in critical analysis. The world would be a total mess. We’d live in caves, and if you’re older than 30 you’d be dead. If you stopped all thinking you wouldn’t be able to take care of yourself.
In fact, part of the tradition of gurus in India is that they wander from town to town and are taken care of by the common folks. That’s great if you’re the guru. But what about everyone else? This is not to mention, of course, that you wouldn’t even be interested in meditation, personal growth, working on your problems, or blogs like this in the first place. It’s just stupid. It’s a complete misunderstanding of what Eastern traditions say about the mind and thought.
The ancient texts rarely refer to thinking per se, and the only issue they mention is being over-identified with your thoughts or feelings, or any experiences for that matter. Even the concept of “excessive thinking” is nonsense. I mean, how would you ever be able to identify the line between excessive thinking and non-excessive thinking? Would it be an hourly thought quota?
If you think in a way in which your mind races or is caught in a loop, it means your process is trying to communicate something to you through your thoughts. The thoughts aren’t the problem. The problem is that you’re not conscious of what they’re trying to communicate to you. Observe them. Listen to them. They’re there for a reason. They’re driving you crazy to try to wake you up about something. Process them—Don’t try to get rid of them. That’s just dumb. Thinking is one of our greatest gifts and it’s one of the keys to knowing yourself.
The other bad translation is the word, “ego,” mostly because the word didn’t exist until the late 1800s and therefore wasn’t even around when these texts were written thousands of years ago. Yet spiritual teachers in the West continually use the word as if it’s actually in the ancient texts and teachings.
If there’s one area of Eastern spiritual practice in the West that’s in a state of utter confusion, it’s the issue of the ego, and what it means. As a psychologist, this one is particularly annoying because “ego” in psychology has a totally different meaning from how spiritual folks use the word. And, to make things even more confusing, neither the Eastern spiritual definition nor the psychology definition has anything to do with the street meaning of ego, ie. being conceited, always right, self-important, etc.
Years ago, Buddhist teachers in the West started using the term “egolessness” to explain the state of mind that meditation aims to achieve. The word is supposed to mean that humans make a fundamental error of perception by thinking that we consist of a lasting, separate self, even though no such self really exists. And by making this error we hurt ourselves and everyone around us by becoming selfish, getting embroiled in our passions and problems, and so on. If we could only see the fallacy of our self-centered egos and understand its bad effects, we would let it go and find true happiness in the interconnectedness that’s our true nature.
Now, this idea is often communicated with vehemence. Teachers who are usually pretty gentle and nonjudgmental can turn quasi vicious when they talk about the ego. It’s common to portray it as a negative, evil part of ourselves. They refer to it as a neurotic, useless, self-harming function. Others are even more extreme; they talk about it like a tyrannical bureaucracy we need to overthrow—a nervous, scheming, devious creature we have to eliminate. The message is always that the ego is so tenacious and damaging we must be constantly vigilant about this human scourge. We must work to eradicate it. It reminds me of how we think about viruses and crime.
If you’re a psychologist and hear of these attacks on the ego, you shake your head in disbelief because in psychology the ego isn’t viewed as being evil at all. It’s not even a singular “thing” you can attack. It’s a cluster of activities, a set of highly important functions of the mind.
Every time you mediate between your raw desires or urges and what you know you should do in a given moment you’re using your ego function. It’s a mental strategy for staying safe and being happy in the midst of all the conflicting demands shouting in your mind. It enables you to say no to your desire to have sex with your neighbor’s wife, or to punch someone in the face, or to have a bowel movement in the street—in the interest of your greater happiness.
If your ego is healthy, it gives you a consistent sense of priorities, helps you define your responsibilities, and shows you right and wrong. It also monitors your experiences so you can learn from them.
From this perspective, egolessness would be a disaster. A person devoid of ego functions would be self-destructive—a beast with uncontrolled impulses, a neurotic, repressed robot with no mind of her own, an infantile monster. Anyone who tried to abandon ego functioning would arrest his psychological development and wouldn’t be able to become a mature, responsible, trustworthy adult.
Now, this isn’t only the view of trained Western psychologists. Buddhist communities in the West have finally begun to recognize this problem and have coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to describe it. It refers to the way some folks avoid dealing with their problems by spending all their time in meditation retreats, using the mantra of “egolessness” to short-circuit the hard work of developing a healthy ego that can help them navigate their lives.
This also happens in situations where people suffer from extreme self-hatred. The Dalai Lama isn’t the only Asian Buddhist teacher surprised at the amount of self- hatred found in the West. Hating yourself is incredibly painful because it prevents you from building a healthy ego. Some people deal with it by embracing the idea of “egolessness” and using it as the Buddha’s stamp of approval for avoiding their self-hatred.
A few of the highly experienced mediation instructors I’ve had as students—folks who’ve dedicated their lives to the practice—seemed almost like idiot savants who can thrive in the seclusion of a year-long retreat but can’t handle being caught in traffic for an hour with a whining child.
Bottom line is your ego is incredibly important. It’s the vehicle through which you navigate life. You need it! It’s your ego that decides that mindfulness meditation would be good for you and that you should have the discipline to practice every day. If you had no ego, you’d sit on your sofa and do nothing. No wait, you wouldn’t have a sofa because you wouldn’t have a job.
The fact is, the Buddhist and Hindu texts are full of recommendations for strengthening your ego. And there are no passages that recommend getting rid of it. The Buddha defines a wise person as one who knows the difference between what are and aren’t his personal responsibilities. Guess what: This is the first principle in any ego functioning. Furthermore, it’s based on another assumption that’s necessary for a healthy ego; The teaching on karma—that we’re responsible for our actions and we’re going to experience their results. But the ultimate refutation of the idea that meditation is for losing your ego, is the fact that the Buddha’s discourses on mindfulness very often describe the meditator’s self-awareness using the terms, “I,” “me,” and “mine”; this is the ego.
So, how did poor Mr. Ego get so confused on its trip from Asia to the West? The modern meaning of “ego” in Asian languages is actually quite similar to the street meaning of “ego” in the West—pride, narcissism, conceit, arrogance, etc.. But Asian spiritual traditions don’t use this word at all in their ancient texts. As I said, it didn’t exist yet. It’s a psychology term used by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who took it from psychologist, John Dewey (1859-1952). It comes from the Latin word meaning, “I.”
The moral of the story is, if you want to heal and grow into your whole authentic self don’t waste your time trying to quiet your mind or be egoless. Shine the light of your mindful awareness onto your thoughts, feelings, and problems. Observe them from a neutral, non-judgmental place, and then apply processing tools. True transformation requires intervening in and processing your problems, not just meditating and blissing out (To learn more about this, read my blog, Mindfulness Is Only the First Step in Personal Growth). To learn processing tools for transforming your problems, listen to my podcast, The Dr. Zwig Show.
