Cold Shower 12: The Prison of the Mind

Cold Shower The Prison of Mind Volume I, Article XII

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of five books and more than 200 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I have these friends who are near retirement, have beautiful home, generous retirement compensation plans, and a handsome investment portfolio. They are extremely well fixed for the future, but totally miserable. They both enjoyed long and fruitful careers as academics, yet they are like children when it comes to their personal lives. She is a professor of psychology, an excellent teacher and conscientious scholar, the picture of health and beauty. She is also insecure, obsessively controlling, especially of her husband, and paranoid to the point of absurdity. It is essential that it be her idea when they have travel plans, entertain or organize any activity. She even refuses to allow her husband to visit a grown daughter from a previous marriage without her presence. Although not an evil person, she clocks her husband’s every move, and gives him little room to free lance his emotions. Her husband, a sociologist professor and wonderful teacher, is kind and accessible. He cherishes his life, which he constructed from an orphanage foundation, while becoming increasingly exhausted from embattled debates with his wife. What can be done? What should he do?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Most readers I would imagine can identify with this scenario in context if not this specific content. Certainly I can. We are all prisoners of our minds, being tossed hither and yon with conflicting glee, from desire to fear, from suffering to rapture, from lust to love, from freedom to duty, and of course, always back again as well. Since we create our own hell, only we can choose to end it. Most of us develop a pattern of imprisonment by making our ego system harder and harder, pounding it into one corner of our potential. The result is that we become stuck. Hell is not a place in the afterlife. Hell is where we become stuck with ourselves and on ourselves at the expense of following our bliss.

Our Western tradition puts the emphasis on health, wealth, progeny and achievement. We are programmed to take ourselves seriously, but life not seriously enough. This emphasis corresponds to the three lowest levels of ascendancy to bliss. Put otherwise, few of us rise above our animal nature. Life is taking seriously in the Buddha tradition with this declaration, “Joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” I make this comparison because these two well-educated and well-fixed individuals appear to lack the tools to deal with the dilemma of their imprisonment, i.e., they think too much! It is as if they expect to answers to be found in thought. Thinking is the problem. Answers are never found in thought. They only aggravate the problem. A quiet mind free of thought is the sanctuary of peace and where solutions reside.

A busy mind espouses that a rational solution exists following cause and effect logic, which instead introduces circular paralysis like a dog chasing its own tail. A quiet mind, dead of thought has no sense of desire, fulfillment or regret, no future or past, only what is or reality. Western psychologists have attempted to climb the Buddha chakras by making reference to the soul and transcendence, but fall short of the mark because they cannot get beyond rational thought, which rules but never well.

In our ascendancy to bliss the Buddha would suggest we wear our hearts on our sleeves, as Leopold Bloom did in James Joyce’s Ulysses. This couple might get beyond their mental confinement by 1) stopping to cling to a passionless life. The answers cannot be discovered. They must be created out of the fabric of experience; 2) ceasing to be obsessively lustful. Frustration is often buried in erotica, thanks to Freud’s emphasis of the contractual relationship, quid pro quo (something gained for something given); and 3) abandoning the fear of losing, which is expressed in the fixation with winning and controlling. Aggressive dominance is a misuse of psychic energy.

Western tradition is failing this couple because it is not designed to deal with change. The irony and paradox is that this tradition has created the chaos of change while stubbornly desiring to maintain the status quo of order. Nor is it an accident that popular Western religions ask God to serve man’s animal nature (health, wealth, happiness, progeny and achievement), while purporting to aspire to love as their central premise.

We are prisoners of time and space. It is only by disengaging from this fixation that perspective is realized. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, calls this our collective conscience. Jung concludes that the common theme of the world’s great religions and mythologies intend man to move beyond the psychic obsession of desire and fear to the heart of the matter, love, which is the fourth chakra of Buddha ascendancy to bliss and transcends aggression and obsessive attachment, two contemporary woes.

What these two educators have in common is love, buried in the trauma of obsessive attachment and the fatigue of longing. She wants to control for fear of losing him. He wants freedom but with no apparent objective in mind. Buddha would say, The best things can’t be said because they are transcendent. The second best things are misunderstood because they are using objects of time and space to speak of transcendence. The third best thing is conversation.

These two people need to talk, first to themselves, then to each other. They don’t need a marriage counselor or a psychiatrist. They need to spend more time alone with their individual minds quiet. When the mind is quiet, rational disparities melt away. They are now ready to give each other their full attention. Love will fill the void, but not before. Love is their powerful bond. There would not be such anguish if love were not trying desperately to break through their stubborn egos.

Copyright (1996) See Who Put You In The Cage (due to be published in 2005).