Ирвин Ялом - The Schopenhauer Cure
mistaken form for substance: not only were Earl`s literary observations memorized, but
his repertory of books was limited and static. That was the toughest hit: howcould she
have ever loved a man who did not read? She, whose dearest and closest friends dwelled
in the pages of George Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch, Gaskell, and Byatt?
And that was where John, a red–haired associate professor in her department at
Berkeley with an armful of books, a long graceful neck, and a stand–up Adam`s apple,
came in. Though English professors were expected to be well–read, she had known too
many who rarely ventured out of their century of expertise and were complete strangers
to new fiction. But John read everything. Three years before she had supported his tenure
appointment on the basis of his two dazzling books,Chess: The Aesthetics of Brutality in
Contemporary Fiction andNo Sir!: The Androgynous Heroine in Late Nineteenth–Century
British Literature.
Their friendship germinated in all the familiar romantic academic haunts: faculty
and departmental committee meetings, faculty club luncheons, monthly readings in the
Norris Auditorium by the poet or novelist in residence. It took root and blossomed in
shared academic adventures, such as team teaching the nineteenth–century greats in the
Western civilization curriculum or guest lectures in each other`s courses. And then
permanent bonding took place in the trench warfare of faculty senate squabbles, space
and salary sorties, and brutal promotion committee melees. Before long they so trusted
each other`s taste that they rarely looked elsewhere for recommendations for novels and
poetry, and the e–mail ether between them crackled with meaty philosophical literary
passages. Both eschewed quotations that were merely decorative or clumsily clever; they
settled for nothing less than the sublime—beauty plus wisdom for the ages. They both
loathed Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both loved Dickinson and Emerson. As their shared
stack of books grew taller, their relationship evolved into ever greater harmony. They
were moved by the same profound thoughts of the same writers. They reached epiphanies
together. In short, these two English professors were in love.
«You leave your marriage, and I`ll leave mine.»Who said it first? Neither could
remember, but at some point in their second year of team teaching they arrived at this
high–risk amorous commitment. Pam was ready, but John, who had two preteen
daughters, naturally required more time. Pam was patient. Her man, John, was, thank
God, a good man and required time to wrestle with such moral issues as the meaning of
the marriage vow. And he struggled, too, with the problem of guilt at abandoning his
children and how one goes about leaving a wife, whose only offense had been dullness, a
wife transformed by duty from sparkling lover into drab motherhood. Over and over
again John assured Pam that he was en route, in process, that he had successfully
identified and reconnoitered the problem, and all he needed now was more time to
generate the resolve and select the propitious moment to act.
But the months passed, and the propitious moment never arrived. Pam suspected
that John, like so many dissatisfied spouses attempting to avoid the guilt and the burden
of irreversible immoral acts, was trying to maneuver his wife into making the decision.
He withdrew, lost all sexual interest in his wife, and criticized her silently and,
occasionally, aloud. It was the old «I can`t leave but I pray that she leaves» maneuver.
But it wasn`t working—this wife wouldn`t bite.
Finally, Pam acted unilaterally. Her course of action was prompted by two phone
calls beginning with «Dearie, I think you`d like to know...” Two of Earl`s patients under
the pretense of doing her a favor warned her of his sexual predatory behavior. When a
subpoena arrived with the news that Earl was being sued for unprofessional behavior by
yet another patient, Pam thanked her lucky stars she had not had a child, and reached for
the phone to contact a divorce lawyer.
Might her act force John into decisive action? Even though she would have left her
marriage if there had been no John in her life, Pam, in an astounding feat of denial,
persuaded herself that she had left Earl for the sake of her lover and continued to confront
John with that version of reality. But John dallied; he was still not ready. Then, one day,
he took decisive action. It happened in June on the last day of classes just after an ecstatic
love fest in their usual bower, an unrolled blue foam mattress situated partially under the
tent of his desk on the hardwood floor of his office. (No sofas were to be found in
English professors` offices; the department had been so racked by charges of professors
preying on their female students that sofas had been banned.) After zipping up his
trousers, John gazed at her mournfully. «Pam, I love you. And because I love you, I`ve
decided to be resolute. This is unfair to you, and I`ve got to take some of the pressure
off—off of you, especially, but off me as well. I`ve decided to declare a moratorium on
our seeing one another.»
Pam was stunned. She hardly heard his words. For days afterward his message felt
like a bolus in her gut too large to digest, too heavy to regurgitate. Hour upon hour she
oscillated between hating him, loving and desiring him, and wishing him dead. Her mind
played one scenario after another. John and his family dying in an auto accident. John`s
wife being killed in an airplane crash and John appearing, sometimes with children,
sometimes alone, at her doorstep. Sometimes she would fall into his arms; sometimes
they would weep tenderly together; sometimes she would pretend there was a man in her
apartment and slam the door in his face.
During the two years she had been in individual and group therapy Pam had
profited enormously, but, in this crisis, therapy failed to deliver: it was no match for the
monstrous power of her obsessional thinking. Julius tried valiantly. He was indefatigable
and pulled endless devices out of his toolkit. First, he asked her to monitor herself and
chart the amount of time she spent on the obsession. Two to three hundred minutes a day.
Astounding! And it seemed entirely out of her control; the obsession had demonic power.
Julius attempted to help her regain control of her mind by urging a systematic
incremental decrease of her fantasy time. When that failed, he turned to a paradoxical
approach and instructed her to choose an hour each morning which she would entirely
devote to running the most popular fantasy reels about John. Though she followed
Julius`s instructions, the unruly obsession refused containment and spilled over into her
thoughts just as much as before. Later he suggested several thought–stopping techniques.
For days Pam shouted no at her own mind or snapped rubber bands on her wrist.
Julius also attempted to defuse the obsession by laying bare its underlying
meaning. «The obsession is a distraction; it protects you from thinking about something
else,” he insisted. «What is it concealing?» If there were no obsession, what would you be
thinking about? But the obsession would not yield.
The group members pitched in. They shared their own obsessive episodes; they
volunteered for phone duty so Pam could call them anytime she felt overcome; they
urged her to fill her life, call her friends, arrange a social activity every day, find a man,
and, for God`s sake, get laid! Tony made her smile by requesting an application for that
position. But nothing worked. Against the monstrous power of the obsession, all of these
therapy weapons were as effective as a BB gun against a charging rhinoceros.
Then came a chance encounter with Marjorie, the starry–eyed graduate student cum
Vipassana acolyte, who consulted her about a change in her dissertation topic. She had
lost interest in the influence of Plato`s concepts of love in the works of Djuna Barnes.
Instead she had developed a crush on Larry, Somerset Maugham`s protagonist inThe
Razor`s Edge, and now proposed the topic of «Origins of Eastern Religious Thought in
Maugham and Hesse.» In their conversations Pam was struck by one of Marjorie`s (and
Maugham`s) pet phrases, «the calming of the mind.» The phrase seemed so enticing, so
seductive. The more she thought about it, the more she realized thatmind–calming was
exactly what she needed. And since neither individual nor group therapy seemed capable
of offering it, Pam decided to heed Marjorie`s advice. So she booked airline passage to
India and to Goenka, the epicenter of mind–calming.
The routine at the ashram had indeed begun to offer some mind–calming. Her mind
fixated less on John, but now Pam was beginning to feel that the insomnia was worse
than the obsession. She lay awake listening to the sounds of the night: a background beat
of rhythmic breathing and the libretto of snores, moans, and snorts. About every fifteen
minutes she was jolted by the shrill sound of a police whistle outside her window.
But why could she not sink into sleep? Ithad to be related to the twelve hours of
meditation every day. What else could it be? Yet the 150 other students seemed to be
resting comfortably in the arms of Morpheus. If only she could ask Vijay these questions.
Once while furtively looking about for him in the meditation hall, Manil, the attendant
who cruised up and down the aisles, poked her with his bamboo rod and commented,
«Look inward. Nowhere else.» And when she did spot Vijay in the back of the men`s
section, he seemed entranced, sitting erect in the lotus position, motionless as a Buddha.
He must have noticed her in the meditation hall; of the three hundred, she was the only
one sitting Western style in a chair. Though mortified by the chair, she had had such a
back ache from days of sitting that she had no choice but to request one from Manil,
Goenka`s assistant.
Manil, a tall and slender Indian, who worked hard at appearing tranquil, was not
pleased with her request. Without removing his gaze from the horizon, he responded,
«Your back? What did you do in past lives to bring this about?»
What a disappointment! Manil`s answer belied Goenka`s vehement claims that his
method lay outside the province of any specific religious tradition. Gradually, she was
coming to appreciate the yawning chasm between the nontheistic stance of rarified
Buddhism and the superstitious beliefs of the masses. Even teaching assistants could not
overcome their lust for magic, mystery, and authority.
Once she saw Vijay at the 11A.M. lunch and maneuvered herself into a seat next to
him. She heard him take a deep breath, as though inhaling her aroma, but he neither
looked at her nor spoke. In fact, no one spoke to anyone; the rule of noble silence reigned
supreme.
On the third morning a bizarre episode enlivened the proceedings. During the
meditation someone farted loudly and a couple of students giggled. The giggle was
contagious, and soon several students were caught up in a giggling jag. Goenka was not
amused and immediately, wife in tow, stalked out of the meditation hall. Soon one of the
assistants solemnly informed the student body that their teacher had been dishonored and
would refuse to continue the course until all offending students left the ashram. A few
students picked up and left, but for the next few hours meditation was disturbed by the
faces of the exiled appearing at windows and hooting like owls.
No mention was ever made again of the incident, but Pam suspected that there had
been a late–night purge since the next morning there were far fewer sitting Buddhas.
Words were permitted only during the noon hour when students with specific
questions could address the teacher`s assistants. On the fourth day at noon Pam posed her
question about insomnia to Manil.
«Not for you to be concerned about,” he replied, gazing off into the distance. «The
body takes whatever sleep it requires.»
«Well then,” Pam tried again, «could you tell me why shrill police whistles are
being blown outside my window all night long?»
«Forget such questions. Concentrate only uponanapana–sati. Just observe your
breath. When you have truly applied yourself, such trivial events will no longer be
disturbances.»
Pam was so bored by the breath meditation that she wondered whether she could
possibly last the ten days. Other than the sitting, the only available activity was listening
to Goenka`s nightly tedious discourses. Goenka, garbed in gleaming white, like all the
staff, strove for eloquence but often fell short because an underlying shrill
authoritarianism shone through. His lectures consisted of long repetitive tracts extolling
the many virtues of Vipassana, which, if practiced correctly, resulted in mental
purification, a path to enlightenment, a life of calmness and balance, an eradication of
psychosomatic diseases, an elimination of the three causes of all unhappiness: craving,
aversion, and ignorance. Regular Vipassana practice was like regular gardening of the
mind during which one plucked out impure weeds of thought. Not only that, Goenka
pointed out; Vipassana practice was portable, and provided a competitive edge in life:
while others whiled away the waiting time at bus stops, the practitioner could
industriously yank out a few weeds of cognitive impurity.
The handouts for the Vipassana course were heavy with rules which, on the
surface, seemed understandable and reasonable.But there were so many of them. No
stealing, no killing of any living creature, no lies, no sexual activity, no intoxicants, no
sensual entertainment, no writing, note taking, or pens or pencils, or reading, no music or
radios, no phones, no luxurious high bedding, no bodily decorations of any sort, no
immodest clothing, no eating after midday (except for first–time students who were
offered tea and fruit at 5P.M. ). Finally, the students were forbidden to question the
teacher`s guidance and instructions; they had to agree to observe the discipline and to
meditate exactly as told. Only with such an obedient attitude, Goenka said, could students
gain enlightenment.
Generally, Pam gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was, after all, a dedicated
man who had devoted his life to offering Vipassana instruction. Of course he was culture–bound. Who wasn`t? And hadn`t India always groaned under the weight of religious
ritual and rigid social stratification? Besides, Pam loved Goenka`s gorgeous voice. Every
night she was entranced by his deep sonorous chanting in ancient Pali of sacred Buddhist
tracts. She had been moved in similar fashion by early Christian devotional music,
especially Byzantine liturgical chants, by the cantors singing in synagogues, and once, in
