Beddhism is weird
It's important that you know that I know this
Beddhism is weird!
Normal people don’t spend hours upon hours just lying in bed feeling their feelings. Normal people don’t claim that spending time feeling your feelings will make you feel better. It’s definitely not normal to claim that the basic reality underlying most mental illness is unhappiness. It’s even weirder to take such a simple practice and a small set of ideas and give the whole thing a name like Beddhism, with a capital letter and an obvious reference to a major world religion.
More than that, a lot of my ideas seem ... not just weird, but flat out wrong. With a lot of what I write, I imagine people reading it and saying something like “Ummmm, dude, I’m kind of with you on part of this, but most of it seems pretty nuts.”
I want you to know that I know that! Some of what I have to say does sound kind of crazy.
A lot of writing on the internet goes something like this: I (the writer) start out with the assumption that you (the reader) share a starting point with me about some basic facts about the world. Then, based on that shared starting point, I try to convince you of some other things that you don’t currently know or haven’t currently thought of.
Because my writing is basically pretty breezy and straightforward and easy to read, it probably comes off like I’m doing the same sort of thing. But I’m not.
The positive reality of Beddhism – this thing that I’ve grasped and am trying to convey, in bits and pieces – is very much not obvious. In fact, it goes against a lot of very basic things that most of us believe about the world and about what it means to be a human being. The weirdness is not superficial. It goes all the way down, to the core of what I’m talking about – to the core of what it means to be a human being, in fact.
What I want to say is simple but also breathtakingly (ludicrously?) ambitious. Being human is not the sort of thing that you think it is. Given that this claim is central to the whole enterprise, it would be surprising if I didn’t come across as a bit of a weirdo.
Now, that same claim is central to at least a few of the major world religions, certainly including Hinduism and Buddhism. For the Hindus, maya or illusion is an absolutely fundamental philosophical concept. The true character of reality is not as it appears. For the Buddhists, maya is a less central concept, but Buddhism shares the idea that normal people misperceive the nature of reality. According to the teachings of the Buddha, one seeks the cessation of suffering by meditating and gradually developing a new and very different awareness of reality from the one we normally hold.
What I’m doing is sort of parallel to Buddhism in some pretty fundamental ways. I do believe that we (all of us!) have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the nature of suffering. (I usually call it “unhappiness” rather than “suffering,” but maybe that’s a mistake! Maybe suffering is a better word for what I’m talking about.) I don’t agree with the Buddhists about the true nature of suffering – but I agree with them that you, dear reader, don’t understand what suffering is.
Am I, then, developing a new religion? Am I that weird?
I want to say, yes and no. But mostly no.
Unlike most religions, including Buddhism, I don’t think Beddhism is supposed to become a permanent part of your life. Follow the path, feel better, and then return to your ordinary life! Unlike most religions, there’s no superstructure, no churches, no dogmas, no rituals, nothing to worship.
What I’m doing definitely has some spiritual or religious aspects, though. For instance, I believe that one needs to follow a specific spiritual path (feel your feelings) in order to fully understand what I’m saying. That claim is very commonly held and is part of several religions.
Unlike Christianity (and Judaism and Islam), I also want to say that faith is not needed to see the truth. If you follow the path – if you feel your feelings for long enough – you will start to see the truth. The truth isn’t true because I say it’s true – heaven forbid – nor is it true because God revealed it or anything like that. It’s true (if it is true) only if, when you try it, you come to these specific realizations.
Of course, Buddhists make this same claim about the Buddhist path! So in this sense Beddhism is different from western religions, but similar to Buddhism.
Unlike most religions, Beddhism needs to be scientific. I want to make specific predictions – I have lots of predictions to make! Most of those predictions will be of the form “If you (as a patient) do this, then you will experience this type of improvement in your happiness” or “If you (as a therapist) work with your patients in these ways, then you will help them get better in these respects.” I want to challenge therapists and researchers to find ways to test the predictions. I want for my ideas to be shown to be true (or not true) – or at least helpful (or not helpful) in treating patients.
I also want to say something like: “Given what we know about the structure of the brain, how things like language and sensation are encoded in the brain – and given what we know about evolution, and a few other things – given all of that, the claims of Beddhism make sense.” More than that, I want to say that our ordinary ways of thinking about the world do not make sense if one rejects Beddhism.
I also want to put Beddhism in clear language. It’s unlike Buddhism in this sense. For most Buddhists, once you have reached the end of the path, you come to realize that logic itself breaks down and words have no meaning. At the far end of this is Zen Buddhism, with its impossible riddles like “Show me the sound of one hand clapping.” Some types of Buddhism are less radical than that. And some people disagree with this way of putting it: they say something like, “Western logic breaks down, but the truth can be described in an Eastern logic.” Well, OK, maybe so. But none of that is true for Beddhism. Beddhism is weird, yes, but it is comprehensible in ordinary western logic.
There’s a very interesting book called Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Englightenment, written by Robert Wright in 2017. Wright advocates for a secularized, westernized version of Buddhism, and argues that the understanding of the self and of nature taught by this version of Buddhism conforms to the teachings of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Wright’s version of Buddhism is more a kind of mind science, or philosophy, or even therapy than it is a religion. So maybe what I’m doing is sort of parallel to what Wright does in that book. Some of the qualities of religion but with as much science as possible. I should re-read Wright’s book and see what there it to say.
My primary interest, unlike Wright’s, is in mental illness. This is because of my own personal history with a major anxiety disorder, of course, and I need to write much more than I have about that. But more fundamentally, I think Beddhism is likely to appeal to people who are suffering from mental illness. “Lie in bed all day feeling your feelings and you can find a path toward true happiness” doesn’t sound appealing to people who are basically doing OK. But for people suffering from very serious anxiety, depression, OCD, or a myriad of other conditions, it’s going to sound pretty good. That’s how I found the path in the first place! For months and months and months, it was the only thing I wanted to spend time doing, and I eventually gave myself permission (and got permission from my wonderful wife!) to do it.
So Beddhism is a scientific alternative to psychology? Sort of?
But in some important ways, Beddhism is like a religion and unlike psychology. If you look at the DSM, every definition of mental illness relates it to the way ordinary people live. The definitions of many disorders include language stating that it only counts as a clinical condition if the problems “cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” By definition, then, ordinary people experiencing ordinary levels of distress or dysfunction do not have a problem. Many religions, by contrast, take seriously the possibility that everybody might be suffering in an important way. In Christianity, we’re all sinners; in Hinduism and Buddhism, we all suffer from fundamental illusions about the nature of reality and the self. In this sense, Beddhism is more like a religion than it is like psychology. If you follow the path (feel your feelings), you may well discover that you’re very unhappy – even if no psychologist in the world would even consider diagnosing you with a mental health condition.
Also, trained clinical psychologists aren’t likely to tell you that the path to healing requires spiritual growth, a process via which you will come to see some aspects of reality and your very self in a new way. Some therapists will say things like that, of course. But they tend to be the ones who don’t think much of science, and they get crabby when you ask for supporting data from double-blind clinical trials.
So. Does all of this add up to anything besides confusion? If religion and science are eternally at war with each other, then the whole enterprise is probably impossible.
But maybe it’s good that it’s all so weird. The way things are right now, mental health professionals are totally failing us. We need some bizarre ideas to shake things up. If my ideas have any validity at all, they could imply a substantial rethinking of how to treat mental health problems.
Best of luck to me! I’m going to need it.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading.