self, art and buddhism in the la review of books
“If you’ve ever sat through a silent 10-day meditation retreat, you know the spectacle that is the human mind — the monkey mind (as the Buddhists call it), the clamoring mind; the memories rising, relentlessly, one after another, the sheer acrobatics of thinking. According to certain meditation practices, samsara is the story we create of experience. It is the mechanism of the mind that interprets sensation and turns it into narrative. But we suffer, the thinking goes, because we react to sensation based on these stories. One teacher describes samsara, first, as a line in the sand — erased easily by the rising tide. The danger, he warns, is that over time such lines become as permanent as grooves etched into stone. It’s not just that our stories lack flexibility or nuance, but that they ultimately create a phantom self — a limiting and faulty version of who we are based on past events, with an ego that eclipses our ability to observe the world in the present moment. This, according to the ancients, is the cause of our misery; the alternative, however — the dissolution of ego — is a threatening paradigm for any person to consider, let alone one who has devoted her life to art.”
