Socrates or Buddha?themselves and each other. It’s a worldview that is humanistic
and tragic. The fi rst of the Buddha’s noble truths is that life
is suffering – a ‘noble’ truth since that realisation is also the
fi rst step towards an ennobled life, namely one in which the
suffering can cease.
This is where meditation comes in, on this understanding
of it at least. It’s to develop an awareness and acceptance not
so much of our limits, à la Socrates, as of suffering existence.
Meditation itself needn’t always be painful. It might be pleas-
ant, even elating. But the aim is neither to cling to experience,
nor to reject it, but rather to know it as it is. Hence, the ‘insight’
of insight meditation. Something profound is shown to the
meditator. ‘To understand all is to forgive all,’ the proverb says,
and the Buddhist version would be, ‘To understand all is to let
go of all’. It just takes practice.
This is a spiritual practice – a religion, if you accept the
metaphysics of suffering – presented as a kind of therapy. It’s
no doubt one of the reasons that Buddhism is fi nding such a
ready audience in the West. Modernity has damaged many
egos, perhaps as a result of the Enlightenment teaching that
we are autonomous selves, capable of self-creation, control and
consolation. Only, it turns out that we are not so self-suffi cient.
Hence, if that’s right, another way of understanding the spread
of loneliness and alienation, stress and depression. Western
Buddhism is developing a radical remedy for this condition.
Look closely, it says, and you’ll see that’s an inadequate account
of what it is to be human. Let go of that, and liberation follows.
In this area, mindfulness increasingly rides on the coat tails of
CBT, or cognitive behaviour therapy, the practice that encour-
ages individuals to be aware of destructive patterns of thought.
CBT aims to disrupt these habits of the mind in order that the
individual might return to their normal life. There’s clearly
value in that. Mindfulness in this context does something
slightly different, aiming to develop a conscious of these pat-
terns of thought and feeling, not so much to arrest them as to
let them come and go without gaining a grip on the individual