Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness (New York: Broadway, 1998, 1999) ("The Buddhist way of working with the mind has profound implications for how we as individuals think about change. In Western theories, the hope is always that emptiness can be healed, that if the character is developed or the trauma resolved that the background feelings will diminish. If we can make the ego stronger, the expectation is that emptiness will go away. In Buddhism, the approach is reversed. Focus on the emptiness, the dissatisfaction, and the feelings of imperfection, and the character will get stronger. Learn how to tolerate nothing and your mind will be at rest. Psychotherapy tends to focus on the personal melodrama, exploring its origins and trying to clean up its mess. Buddhism seeks, instead, to purify the insight of emptiness." "Emptiness is vast and astonishing, the Buddhist approach insists; it does not have to be toxic. When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of the truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way. . . .' Id. at 19-20.).
Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust For Life: Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy (New York: Gotham Books, 2005) ("In Buddhist psychology, the root cause of fixation is the assumption of thingness' in persons or objects that, from a Buddhist way of thinking, have no inherent, or ultimate, identity. It is the mind's tendency to become obsessed with this 'thingness,' to see sources of pleasure as more real than they actually are and to chase them with a proliferation of thoughts and feelings. . . . But this concretization of reality is a mistake. People are not objects, and, in the Buddhist way of thinking, even objects are not objects. People and things do not exist in and of themselves in any kind of lasting way. They are all ultimately impermanent, insubstantial and, if we are not very careful, disappointing. When we try to control them, so that they will meet our needs, they tend to rebel." "Desire . . . springs from a place of incompleteness. It is natural reaction to the human predicament. No one, after all, is self-sufficient. In searching outside ourselves for wholeness, however, we set ourselves up for clinging. We assume that solutions all lie in the external: that if we can just be united with that person or this thing that we will be complete, our problems over. . . . Ever seeking our lost half, we spend our lives trying to resurrect a lost unity, searching for a wholeness, or union, that might bring us back to ourselves. This is a dangerous fantasy because it overempowers the object of desire, setting it up as capable of providing a satisfaction that is not in its nature. The path of desire requires something more (or something less) than an imagined unity with the beloved." Id. at 97-98.).
Mark Epstein, Psychotherapy Without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2007) ("Those personality types prone to pathological emptiness who begin Buddhist meditation practices designed to uncover Buddhist emptiness face several potential pitfalls, In the borderline personality, for instance, what is most lacking is the synthetic or integrative capacity of the ego to consolidate and maintain multiple, conflicting self/object representations. The relationship of the self with internalized object relationships is distorted by the defense of splitting in which all good and all bad representations of the same person cannot be integrated. . . . The mindfulness practices actually strengthen the synthetic capacities of the ego [] by training the observing ego to attend to whatever arises without clinging to condemnation, thus allowing conflicting images to present themselves just as they are. . . . However, if the insights practices into emptiness of the ideal ego are attempted prematurely, there are real risks of the loss of the good self-images with which it may be fused, with the preservation and exacerbation of the all-bad, destructive light into depersonalization or identity loss. This would undoubtedly be absolutely terrifying, and this kind of scenario is not uncommon among populations f Western students who undertake intensive practice." Id. at 65.).
Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1995, 1996) ("At my first meditation retreat . . . I was amazed to find myself sitting in the dining hall with an instant judgment about each of the hundred other meditators, based on nothing besides how they looked while eating. Instinctively, I was searching out whom I liked and whom I did not: I had a comment for each one. The seemingly simple task of noting the physical sensations of the in and out breath had the unfortunate effect of revealing just how out of control my everyday mind really was." "Meditation is ruthless in the way it reveals the stark reality of our day-to-day mind. We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath: comforting ourselves, in a perverse fashion, with our own silent voices. Much of our interior life is characterized by this kind of primary process, almost infantile, way of thinking: 'I like this. I don't like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.' . . . Much of our inner dialogue, rather than the 'rather' secondary process that is usually associated with the thinking mind, is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more." "Buddhist mediation takes this untrained everyday mind as its natural stating point, and it requires the development of one particular attentional posture--of naked or bare, attention. Defined as 'the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,' bare attention takes this unexamined mind and opens it up, not by trying to change anything by by observing the mind, emotions, and body the way they are. . . . " Id. at 109-110.).
