“The purpose of Zen is for a human to be as naturally human as a tree is naturally a tree.”- Alan Watts
A tree has no difficulty achieving its nature as a tree. Depending on the nurturing conditions of a tree, its access to sunlight, water, and nutrients, it will be larger, more fully shaped and symmetrical, and bright and healthy in its leaves, fruit and flowers. Yet even a tree growing in poor environmental conditions will be itself, a natural tree, though perhaps stunted, misshapen, and barren in its physical manifestation, while in its essence still maximizing its being a tree. It fully expresses its tree-ness within whatever conditions it finds itself. This is so for all plants and animals except humans.
Humans raised within civilization have little to no idea what it is to be natural, rather taking on the conditioned beliefs ABOUT being human which the culture and society around them shapes in them. As civilization is an artificial construct, imbalanced in many ways, even though the society may provide what it defines as fostering full health and prosperity, civilized humans can still be withered in their mind and soul. Civilization, while for the most fortunate, may give the optimum in physical safety and security, generally does not provide a security of mind or soul, and for many, the task of managing not only physical security but psychological safety is quite challenging. One may be a perfect physical specimen and possess high IQ and wealth yet be quite disconnected from the inner security of knowing one’s own deepest nature as arising out of the balance and harmony of nature. This is why civilized humans become mentally ill, and to not know what it is to be naturally human is a pretty good explanation for how mental illness has become widespread in civilized life.
From this definition, the degree to which a person may be mentally ill correlates to the degree of distance they are from their natural self. Humans raised within aboriginal nature-based cultures are generally naturally, harmoniously human, without neuroses and character disorders, because the environment which gives rise to them is the balance and harmony of Nature. When Native Americans first experienced Europeans, it was very clear to the Native Americans that these humans were quite insane in that they had no sense of their origin in or respect for the natural world. Europeans were murderous, rapacious, deceitful, judgmental, emotionally unbalanced, violent, and unnaturally tense in ways that were clearly insane to the natives. As Buddhism teaches, the degree of disconnection from nature and one’s natural self will arise from the degree of unnaturalness of the conditioning factors shaping a person. This separation of the sense-of-self from one’s original and natural humanness leaves a person in a state of confusion about life, manifesting an array of mental illness symptoms, causing a kind of suffering that is quite unnatural, which Buddhism called dukkha.
In our culture, we diagnose a person as mentally ill when symptoms such as depression, anxiety, obsessiveness, anger, disorganized thinking, delusions, hallucinations, addictions, etc. interfere significantly with life functioning. It would be hard to argue, however, that even “healthy” individuals do not experience and suffer from sub-clinical levels of some of these symptoms. One is considered mentally healthy in our society if they do not display symptomology to a level which causes them and/or others blatant distress. This level of psychological dysfunction is what our mental health professions address, yet we are not really addressing mental health, but rather, mental illness. We simply do not know what it is to be fully mentally and spiritually healthy human beings.
We are cut off from the base of our existence by several thousand years of ever-complexifying civilization, with the consequence that we individually and collectively are functioning far below what might be called optimal human mental health. Buddhism directly addresses this problem by reminding us that we are originally healthy humans who have been misled into conceiving of ourselves and the world falsely. We are in a kind of hypnotic trance of artificiality which has us quite confused and conflicted. The word, “buddha” means awakened person, and the purpose of Buddhism (the teaching and practices of awakening) is to awaken us to our original and natural humanness, emphasizing that, of course, we are already buddhas, just buried under misleading, confusing, even traumatizing social, cultural, and psychological conditioning.
The Buddha has been called “The Great Physician” for his diagnosis and treatment recommendations for this illness. He proposed the assumption that every human, at birth, is a natural and psychologically healthy, yet unformed being. If the family and society that raise this child instill a strong sense of their original worth and connection with other humans and the natural world, this will develop an emotionally healthy human. If, on the other hand, the conditioning influences on a child emphasize competition, the need to prove oneself worthy through meeting what are often contradictory and impossible expectations, this will harm the development of a natural self. If the child is quite cut off from a nurturing community and nature, experiencing varying degrees of trauma caused by insecure egos seeking to strengthen themselves at the child’s expense, this will warp the sense of self. If the child is not taught the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings as is the way of Nature, this objectifies the child, other humans, and the natural world. All this creates a false sense of self which is without balance and the qualities of wisdom and compassion. This false and insecure self is the human ego misshaped.
The ego is the psychological faculty for interacting with other humans and the world to meet the physical and psychological needs of being human, and the human ego is a masterpiece of evolutionary development, as are our opposable-thumbed hands, biocular and bipedal sight and stance allowing for a complexity and creativity in our functioning possessed by no other creature. The human ego is NOT, however, designed to be either our identity or the template for human society, yet this is what civilization at this stage of human social evolution has done. We know not who or what we naturally are. Rather, we live inside a running mental commentary about who we think we and others are and what the world is, all created, not by direct experience and deep inquiry, but rather by what we are led to believe by the complex matrix of socializing and conditioning factors which create the stories of “me” and “the world.” It’s all very confusing, shallow, and unstable with dangerous individual and collective implications. This genius ego now goes about constructing a life chasing after security in ways which only add to the collective malaise and do nothing to provide the actual emotional and spiritual security we lack.
The purpose of Buddhism in its teachings and practices is to take us back out of this confusion and into a direct experience of being naturally human. It seeks to erase the confusion of our story of “me” by returning us to our foundational experience as human consciousness that can examine the felt sense of our confusion and the felt sense of clarity and insight which arises naturally with original human consciousness. Buddhism delineates there are two minds in every person, their original, or big, or buddha (awakened) mind and the false ego-mind, little, confused, compulsively spinning stories ABOUT being a person. This examination, central to Buddha’s prescription, is meditation, meant to achieve, to reawaken our BEING a balanced, insightful and compassionate human who does not suffer, not just manage the symptoms of being an unbalanced, unnatural human.
This is not to say this erases pain. Consciousness teacher Eckhart Tolle, who brilliantly created a philosophy of healthy human living by contemporizing Buddhist teaching, tells us that “pain is not suffering, pain plus story is suffering.” Pain plus stories which subjectify the issue of pain and amplify the natural pain into what is intolerable, what ought not be happening to me, create our suffering. Pain is. You can see this in animals. They become sick and injured, they experience hardship, loss of habitat, yet they do not complain. They do not subjectively, psychologically suffer. They live within the what-is of whatever is happening. Buddhism teaches this is the characteristic of a psychologically and spiritually healthy human. It also teaches this is not some capacity for us to acquire, but rather to liberate, to rediscover buried under our egoic story which needs certain conditions in order to be psychologically OK, lest we suffer.
Buddhism teaches that there is a bright sense of well-being, even joy, which is the natural state of being human. Anthropologists discover such beings in aboriginal people untainted by civilization. Buddhism’s purpose is to awaken this level of naturalness and health in humans living within their contemporary society. This is why I find Buddhism, despite being categorized as a religion, to be a remarkably sophisticated and effective psychology. Buddhism emphasizes that there is a completely sane human within each of us, and it calls this completely sane human, buddha, a human who is awake to their full potential. It calls us to awaken to our true and natural self, the buddha we already are, out of the hypnotic trance of the artificial and imbalanced being our social and psychological conditioning has tricked us into believing we are. Buddhism’s teachings and practices guide us to discover within us this awake, sane, wise, compassionate, resourceful, natural human being who can live within human society without being driven insane by it. I see this as the next level of human evolution where we bring ego’s brilliance and creativity at understanding and interacting with the world back into a level of naturalness which is sane and sustainable. We must wake up to who we naturally are, discovering we are already buddha with this remarkable faculty called ego by design – before ego-constructed society, having invented planet-destroying technologies, kills all that is natural. Buddhism has provided the blueprint for how we find our way back to what we already are – awake, compassionate, and wise beings who possess this remarkable faculty, the human ego, that having destroyed Eden, can reclaim and restore it.