Understanding Selflessness and Enlightenment - and How Meditation Effects on Dissociation

The book Infinite Life was published in 2004 by Robert Thurman. Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman is the first Westerner (American) to be ordained by the Dalai Lama as a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a professor, who teaching on Buddhism in Columbia University. After traveling many places, Thurman returned to The United States when his father died, also Thurman wanted to continue his studies and become an academic because Thurman thought “The only lay institution in America comparable to monasticism is the university" (Thurman 440). As the result, Robert Thurman is co-founder of Tibet House New York and is co-curator of two important and critically acclaimed exhibitions of Tibetan art. The purpose of opening a nonprofit organization, which is the Tibetan house, is to protect and help preserve Tibetan Culture in exile (Robert Thurman).

Thurman’s “Wisdom” that has been studied and read by many students was about trying to find themselves. Thurman focuses on realizing our own selflessness; its purpose is to be happy, more humble, open-minded, and enlightened. To obtain selflessness you must enlighten yourself from certain things, and Thurman deeply explains his beliefs in Tibetan Buddhism as well as tries to make Western people believe in Buddha psychology, which is based on his discovery of actual and ultimate reality. This the Buddha called: “selflessness” and “voidness”, or “emptiness.” (Thurman 441). People can be Buddha because the interconnection connects every single creature in the world at the beginning of life.

The way of finding oneself can be compared with Martha Stout’s “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday”. Martha Stout is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Boston, also for twenty-five years, she served on the faculty in psychology in the department of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Stout wrote a number of widely read books on psychology, and translated them into many languages, such as: The Sociopath Next Door, The Myth of Sanity, The Paranoia Switch. Moreover, The Sociopath Next Door book won the Books for a Better Life Award, Best Book in Psychology in 2005. Her works in psychology and cultural commentary has appeared in The Boston Globe and The Huffington Post. Stout now lives in Cape ann, Massachusetts with her family (“Martha Stout”).

When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday which is taken from The Myth of Sanity was published in 2002 by Martha Stout. In it she talks about the traumatic stress disorder that her patients struggle with. In each of her stories, she reveals how missing memories from the past can disrupt experiences in the present. At the beginning of this short essay, Stout writes, “Imagine you are locked in your house, cannot get out. It is the dead of winter” (Stout 420). Stout explains the feelings when the occurrences happen and discussed what the traumas really feel like. Throughout the reading, Stout focuses on one woman in particular, Julia, a successful woman who is incapable of remembering anything about her childhood. After all those years, Julia lived with a horrible parents and experienced traumatic events, Julia had learned not to cry, as well as pretended that she would “go somewhere else”; she would “not be there” (Stout 426). Stout explains how that childhood trauma can cause memory loss and significant emotional damages. Emotional detachment and dissociation are some of the more serious afflictions of this unlucky happening. Finally, Stout recognizes to the readers that just one traumatic experience can cause emotional detachment and dissociation from the past.

No, it is not possible because one of the ways that self-emptying connects the individual with the the external world possible through the energy of deep meditation. According to About Buddhism definition, meditation is at the heart of the Buddhist way of life, and is basically a method for understanding and working on our own mind (“What is Buddhism?”). Actually, meditation is a practice in order to train an individual is mind or cause a mode of consciousness. Additionally, Wikipedia further states that meditation is need either to realize some benefit or for the mind to simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content or as an end in itself ("Meditation"). Everybody can learn basically technical skills of meditation and experience great benefits. Furthermore, people usually find it develops naturally as they experience the benefits of their meditation practice (“What is Buddhism?”). The aim of meditation is to clear the mind, enjoy deep relaxation, and ease many health issues, such as high blood pressure, heart rate, depression, and anxiety,... so on.

More than a decade passed by, Thurman’s idea of selflessness and enlightenment is yet an idealization that people want to fight for. There is misknowledge such as to become nobody, or the self-righteous that blinds the eyes from seeking the enlightenment. It sounds nothing wrong with Thurman’s idea of being happy that people wish for their entire lifetime, but what happiness would be like if they have not suffered the pain and the selfishness as “a terrorist in their own brain” (Thurman 441). Unless struggling with our own pseudo-self, realizing selflessness would make no sense. Therefore, I think that Stout's patients should get understanding of Thurman's