Socrates or Buddha?crisis of selfhood by undermining people’s sense of their indi-
viduality. Buddhism could address this – interestingly, in a way
that looks like a mirror opposite of the remedy it is developing
in the West today, where a conversely over-powerful notion of
separate individuality is doing the damage. But it took fi ve cen-
turies. The diffi culty is that we’re only some way into the second
century of Western Buddhism, if you mark the engagement of
philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the start of
the process. There’s a long way to go. And this, perhaps, is the
core reason for current incongruities. On the other hand, if you
care about the spiritual life, and the place of meditation in it,
then they are diffi culties that should not be sidelined – though
I suspect that they often are, because individuals who turn to
Buddhism, and invest themselves in it, resist the anxiety that
questioning their new spiritual home might entail.
My sense, for what it’s worth, is that the letting go of mindful-
ness is best not aimed at the lessening of suffering in the indi-
vidual, though that may happen by and by. Rather, it is about
this process of constructive doubt – questioning what you take
to be the case, so that what you didn’t know can emerge, no
longer held at bay by the too small worries of the ego. It might
be called a Socratic form of spirituality. The meditative attitude
is like the elenchus: they are midwives to what can be discov-
ered by the individual which, like a child in the womb, is both
of you and not you. It’s a tune beyond us and yet ourselves.
This means that mindfulness needs to go along with other
forms of agnostic questioning, and together they’ll take on the
character of waiting. What’s admitted is that you yourself are
not up to the task of fi xing your own life. That’s let go of. And
instead of just giving yourself to yourself, you aim to give your-
self to the transcendent. You have no power to determine how
it will arise within you. As an agnostic, you have no certainty
anything will arise within you. But you are prepared to wait,
driven by an intuited conviction that there is more to life. It’s
a kind of letting go that is not nihilistic because it is also an
attempt at letting in – by a glimpse, by what might be revealed.