Heali g

Di ci li e
 Editorial Team:

Jeffrey Fortuna, Project Director

Skye K. Levy, Managing Editor

Kate Keach, Copyeditor

Cover artwork by

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche (www.kongtruljigme.com)

Copyright Jeffrey Fortuna, 2020

 Contents

About the Authors.....................................................................................................................4

Foreword by Karen Kissel Wegela ............................................................................................8

Introduction to Healing Discipline by Jeffrey Fortuna ................................................................. 12

Dreaming and Psychopathology

Introduction by Jeffrey Fortuna ............................................................................................. 22

I. Lucid Dreaming, Lucid Waking ..................................................................................... 30

II. Dream Formation......................................................................................................... 46

III. Psychopathology ......................................................................................................... 60

Styles of Counter-Transference

Introduction by Jeffrey Fortuna ............................................................................................. 78

I. Passion and Intention in Psychotherapy ......................................................................... 82

II. Phases of Patient-Therapist Interaction......................................................................... 96

III. Meaningful Interpretation ......................................................................................... 112

The Psychology of Birth and Death

Introduction by Jeffrey Fortuna ........................................................................................... 128

I. The Bardo Experience ................................................................................................. 134

II. The Iconography of Visions: Six Realms and the Six Bardos ...................................... 146

III. The Mandala Principle: Practice and Presence in the Bardo...................................... 162

Endnotes ............................................................................................................................... 174

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3
 About the Authors

Edward Podvoll and Jeffrey Fortuna

studying together.

(Summer of 1985)

Edward Mitchell Podvoll (1936–2003) was a pioneer in the field of mental health who
developed innovations in home and community care for persons recovering from extreme mental
states. He was unique in joining his classical psychoanalytic training with intensive Buddhist
contemplative experience during the last thirty years of his life. The legacy he left is a
comprehensive body of work: his classic text Recovering Sanity (Shambhala Publications, 2003), six-
hundred audio recordings of his lectures and clinical consultations, published and
unpublished manuscripts, lecture and author notes, clinical logs, and personal
correspondence. The Windhorse Legacy Project was established after Dr. Podvoll’s death
to preserve, publish, and teach from this legacy, as well as from the work of other master
Windhorse practitioners and like-minded luminaries. Visit us at windhorselegacy.org.
The current volume, Healing Discipline, is drawn from his archive.
Dr. Podvoll inspired generations of therapists through four life phases: as senior staff
psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge and Austen Riggs Center (1966–1977); his teaching of
contemplative psychotherapy at Naropa University (1978–1990); his work with the
Windhorse Project (1981–2003) that culminated in the publication of Recovering Sanity;
and his twelve-year meditation retreat in a Buddhist monastery (1990–2002). For more
biographical information, reference Skye Levy’s “About Edward Podvoll” on the
Windhorse Legacy Project website.

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 Dr. Podvoll’s began his graduate training and early career during the cultural awakening of the
1960s. Swept up in these waves of change, mental health care also underwent a paradigm shift
known as the community mental health movement. Many experimental therapeutic communities
developed, led by revolutionary psychiatrists who were exploring new perspectives on mental
health and illness. Most notably, R.D. Laing, MD (Kingsley Hall, London); his student David
Goldblatt, MA (Burch House, New Hampshire); Loren Mosher, MD (Soteria House, California;
Soteria Bern, Switzerland); John Perry, MD (Diabasis, California); and Stanislov Grof, MD
(holotropic breathwork). Even though these pioneers and the communities they led have since
passed into history, their influence continues and students carry on.
In this transformative context of open inquiry, Dr. Podvoll developed a deep interest in the
spiritual dimensions of psychotic states and in the means to bring out the natural intelligence in
each of us to care for ourselves. Dr. Podvoll’s wide-ranging interests in mental healing, especially
from psychosis, caused him to search for and study with noted mentors such as Otto Will, MD,
Harold Searles, MD, and Tibetan Buddhist teachers and physicians who generously shared their
medicine lineages with him. Based on extensive study and experience, Dr. Podvoll was able to join
several healing disciplines, including psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Buddhist meditation and
psychology, Native American healing traditions, the science of Yoga, and other shamanic
traditions.
Matured by training, Dr. Podvoll continued his clinical research. He developed a unique
approach to empathically exploring the depths of autobiographical accounts, both written and in-
person, of extreme mental states. The fearless strength of his insight revealed these first-person
stories as instructive parables that clarify the interplay of mental imbalance and health. This
research led him to develop a unique and comprehensive psychology of psychosis and recovery
which he clearly presented in Recovering Sanity. In his therapy practice, he became hyper-sensitive
to the appearance of what he termed islands of clarity—fleeting moments of recovery in the midst of
the most extreme mental turmoil. He, along with his colleagues, then designed complete
therapeutic environments to nurture such islands of clarity, to promote recovery and growth for
suffering persons and everyone else involved. The clinical skills of basic attendance evolved in that
work. He called this approach environmental treatment, which led to the creation of the Windhorse
Project. Windhorse has since become an international network of therapeutic communities that
continue to practice and evolve the core approach.

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 Through the parable of his life, Dr. Podvoll showed how to develop oneself on a lifelong journey
of becoming a healer by integrating one’s diverse talents and passions around the intention to work
for others’ benefit. For Dr. Podvoll, his journey was to develop and synchronize his passionate
interests as scholar, teacher, author, healer, meditator, and especially as student. Such a journey
may seem daunting to us because we are aware of our personal limitations in relation to the vast
amount of knowledge we know we need to learn. Yet fear of learning can be overcome with the
help of trusted mentors and time-tested practices. In this volume, Dr. Podvoll speaks to us as
mentor and shares this path of healing discipline that each of us is fully able to follow in our own
way.

Jeffrey Fortuna, MA, LPC, received his MA in contemplative psychotherapy at Naropa

University (1980) and served on the Naropa faculty until 1989. In 1981, he co-founded the first
Windhorse center, Maitri Psychological Services, in Boulder, Colorado. From 1989–1992, he
founded and directed a Windhorse group in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 1992, he co-founded
Windhorse Associates, Inc., in Northampton, MA, and served as executive/clinical director. In
2002, he returned to Boulder as co-director, senior therapist, and supervisor at Windhorse
Community Services. He has served as the director of the Windhorse Legacy Project since 2002.
He has taught widely and has written a book chapter and papers on Windhorse treatment. He was
a close student of Edward Podvoll for twenty-five years and has also studied with R. D. Laing;
Maxwell Jones; Chögyam Trungpa; and with other elders, teachers, and mentors.

Karen Kissel Wegela, PhD, has been studying, practicing, and teaching the integration of
Buddhist teachings and psychotherapy for nearly forty years. She is a professor at Naropa
University in the graduate Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology department
and served as its director for fifteen of those years. She has presented at numerous workshops and
conferences, both nationally and internationally, and is the author of three books: How to Be a Help
instead of a Nuisance (re-issued as What Really Helps) (Shambhala Publications), The Courage to Be Present:
Buddhism, Psychotherapy and the Awakening of Natural Wisdom (Shambhala Publications), and her most
recent book, Contemplative Psychotherapy Essentials: Enriching Your Practice with Buddhist Psychology (W. W.
Norton). She is a psychologist in private practice.

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7
 Foreword
Karen Kissel Wegela, PhD

I met Dr. Edward Podvoll, MD, in the summer of 1979, when I came to Boulder for five weeks
of the summer program at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University). He struck me as shy and
intriguing. I took two classes with him that summer: one on psychosis and the other on the
teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ed talked about psychosis, or as he preferred to call it,
“extreme states of mind,” in ways that I had never heard before. He was interested in the
wakefulness and sanity that was always present, even in someone who lived in a private delusional
world. As a practicing psychologist and Buddhist practitioner myself, I was very drawn to his
radical approach.
In the other class, Ed co-taught with Judy Lief. Ed deferred to her in all ways, and that’s what
gave me the initial impression that he was shy. That would turn out to be one of many differing
impressions that I had of Ed over the years.
In both classes, Ed brought together the clinical work of psychotherapy with the teachings on
inherent wakefulness presented by Buddhism. I had been searching for a way to think about these
two seemingly disparate practices in my own life. While I knew other meditators, and I knew other
therapists, I didn’t know anyone who could address how they worked together. I knew that they
did, somehow, but I didn’t know how. Ed was the first person that I met who could not only
articulate the ways in which each practice could enhance the other, but he could also show how
they could be applied in practical ways in clinical work. I moved to Boulder some months later; I
was hooked.
Soon after I moved to Boulder, Ed asked me to do some teaching at Naropa. In 1982, at his
recommendation, Judy Lief invited me to become a member of the core faculty and join Ed in
what was then called the Buddhist and Western Psychology M.A. program (now Contemplative
Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology). We became co-directors, colleagues, and friends. It was
during those years, until Ed left for retreat in 1990, that I worked closely with him.
Ed wasn’t easy for me. He could be a generous and brilliant teacher, sharing both his insights
and his doubts. He could be personal, engaging, warm, and utterly transparent. He could also be
unexpectedly aloof, rude, and dismissive; he could neglect to follow through on commitments, and
once he showed up drunk to a class. I was often in the position of receiving students’ anger and

8
complaints about his lack of availability. They wanted more of him. Students were drawn to his
genuine charisma, and it was common for them to idealize him. Some of his closest students even
regarded him as a fully awakened being and saw him as a kind of saint.
Despite any temptation I may still have (for instance, while writing this Foreword) to reduce
Ed to some concise description, I have learned to do as he suggests himself in the seminars that this
book presents: to resist the urge to turn rich, multidimensional experience into mere categories and
thereby lose the inherent wisdom to be found even in confusion.
For me, it has been a sheer delight to revisit these seminars. It is in his teaching and his clinical
work, I believe, that Ed’s extraordinary gifts as a healer and trainer of healers are most clearly
revealed. These seminars are startlingly fresh and applicable to both our own personal practices of
awakening and our work as psychotherapists and counselors.
In contemplative psychotherapy, we always begin with ourselves and therefore Ed invites us to
begin by exploring our own dreaming, our own counter-transferences, and our own experiences
of bardo. Ed shows how, on the basis of getting to know all these experiences in ourselves through
the precision and discipline of shamatha/vipashyana (mindfulness/awareness) meditation, we develop
the confidence that we can trust the workability of our own minds. We realize that we can
experience whatever arises in our minds and in our experience. With such confidence we can, as
Ed says, “enter” another’s world. We don’t have to protect ourselves from feeling, and fully
experiencing, whatever comes up when we do that. That lets us exercise the true kindness of being
with another person without trying to change them for our own comfort. Having prepared in this
way, and continuing to practice ongoingly, we then can work skillfully and compassionately with
others.
If I were to include all of the jewels that I have found in re-reading these seminars, this
Foreword would become as long as the book. Here, instead, are just some of the highlights that
spoke directly to me.
In the first seminar, Dreaming and Psychopathology, Ed presents, among other things, the
outrageous suggestion that we are dreaming most, if not all, of the time. As I read it, and for days
afterwards, I became very aware of how much time I spend in dream: not awake in the present
moment. Instead, I am more often than not lost in thinking, thinking about thinking, thinking
about dreaming, returning again and again, as is our nature, to just this, just this, just this very

9
moment without words. As he does in all of the seminars, Ed ties everything to how our own
development directly affects our work with our patients and clients.
He also talks about how our meditation practice only becomes truly alive when we begin
working with others:

You only understand why you’re meditating at all when you begin to work with people. It’s the
only time it makes any real sense. They just go together. You could have the most clear,
beautiful, lucid, crystalline consciousness in the world sitting in the room by yourself. Useless.
And when you work with people, you just seem to understand why you’re meditating, why
your inspiration to do the practice is going further and further. Because you just see its
meaningfulness (91).

When I read that, I wanted to cheer; I wanted to share it. And that, too, speaks to what Ed is
presenting: it is our nature, our brilliant sanity, to want to heal, to want to help. And clients have
that same nature. They, too, want to heal and help us.
In the second seminar, on Styles of Counter-Transference, Ed delves deeply into the processes at
work in all relationships, and especially that specialized relationship of therapist and client.
Reading it, I smiled as I recognized so many of the doubts and questions I carry myself as a
psychotherapist: how to be fearless in letting myself experience everything that arises within me;
how to stay open while recognizing that my clients enter my world as much as I enter theirs; how
to work with our shared experiences of loneliness and intimacy as they arise on the spot in a session.
I was particularly interested in seeing again what Ed made of the bardo teachings in the third
seminar, The Psychology of Birth and Death. I took two courses with him on those teachings during his
time at Naropa, and now I teach them myself every spring. I was struck by his utter conviction in
the inherent wisdom in all of us, therapists and clients.

The wisdom that is inherent to us, fundamental to us, can be connected with no matter where
we are or what we are doing. That is basic psychotherapy (163).

He describes the six traditional styles of confusion and their wisdom counterparts in terms that
bring these ancient teachings vividly alive and into our current world. Presenting them in the
1980s, Ed couldn’t foresee how we live in a world now in which the experience of bardo, of
uncertainty and doubt, is avoided in every arena. He reminds us of the importance of the in-
between, the bardo experience. “If one catalogued the practices that occur within these sixty

10
pages,” he says, “there might wind up to be a hundred or more, but basic to all of them is ‘recognize
and rest’” (169). It is only when we let ourselves not know, when we recognize our experience as it
is and rest in it, beyond word and concept, that we can find our way forward.
When Ed left for retreat, he gave me a poem. In it, he cited the words of our mutual dharma
teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, “I think we have a revolution on our hands. You should
think of it like that” (E. M. Podvoll, personal communication, July 3, 1990). Ed went on to exhort
me to “keep the revolution alive.” I hope you will find inspiration in these seminars. A wonderful
journey may await you as you read through them. Be sure not to miss the back and forth between
Ed and the participants in the seminar. There you can see Ed in his element, interacting on the
spot with whatever arises.

October 2020
Boulder, Colorado

11
 Introduction to Healing Discipline
Jeffrey Fortuna

D uring most of Edward Podvoll’s adult life, he was a psychiatrist, educator, and author
whom we all, colleagues and patients, simply knew as Ed. For the last thirteen years of his
life, he was a practicing Buddhist monk in retreat and was known to us then as Lama Mingyur,
but that is a story for another time. Ed was a pioneer in developing the field of “contemplative
psychotherapy” both at Naropa University and the Windhorse Project, which is the joining of
meditation with psychotherapy. I worked closely alongside Ed for twenty-five years, beginning in
1977 in Boulder, Colorado. He was my dear friend and mentor in the healing arts, and upon his
death I inherited his intellectual legacy. In my view, even though he is gone, his adventurous spirit
and the truth of what he discovered remains vibrant and relevant. I heartily welcome and invite
you to walk this path of healing discipline that Ed presents here. He remains ready to show us the
way as guide and companion. I feel the material presented in this volume is especially relevant to
the fields of psychology and psychotherapy as it is an exploration of human sanity and mental
health that are embedded in even the most extreme mental states. This balances the over-emphasis
in Western therapies on pathology as the primary focus to evolve toward a more humane view of
whole-person health and recovery, which is the medicine of the future.
This current volume is an edited presentation of three public seminars that Ed gave at Naropa
University in 1986–1987. The period in which these seminars were given was an exciting and
creative time for us. Ed, others in our core group, and I had already been teaching and studying
together at Naropa for ten years, having founded the first Windhorse therapeutic community in
1981. We had the feeling we were involved in a revolution in the field of Western psychotherapy.
Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of Naropa University and meditation teacher, was a close mentor
to us. He designed the “Brilliant Sanity” logo just below, which he gave to the Naropa University’s
master’s program in Buddhist and Western psychology, which was later renamed “Contemplative
Psychotherapy.” This image has come to symbolize our core approach to training in psychological
healing at both Naropa University and the Windhorse Project. Ed was director of this master’s
program from 1978 through 1990. In 1980, our small group began publishing the Journal of
Contemplative Psychotherapy (1983). We explained the meaning of this logo, which was embossed in
gold on the cover of our inaugural issue, with these words:

12
 The emblem “Brilliant Sanity” proclaims the existence of an inherent wakefulness that can
be pointed to, recognized, and encouraged through psychological work. This is not
metaphysics or metapsychology, nor is it some idealized picture. It is genuine experience
that is simple, direct, and sane. It arises from clarifying the nature of mind processes. This
kind of psychological work involves a progression through discipline, gentleness, and
courage, in developing ourselves and in helping others to grow.
The wheel in the center of the emblem stands for the principle of discipline. For the
psychotherapist, discipline means that one has the fearlessness to accurately study one’s
own mind and environment. From that there develops gentleness in one’s own life. The
bodhi leaf represents the possibility of extending that gentleness to others. The warmth that
expands to others is the necessary environment that allows one to appreciate and truly
understand the state of mind of another. The arch represents the courage and daring to
help others by any means and beyond our own personal and professional interests. (1)1

In the spring of 1985, Ed was asked by the faculty to teach a series of three-weekend public
seminars on topics of special interest to him and he agreed. The title of the seminar series was
“Contemplative Psychotherapy: Joining Psychotherapy and Meditation.” In November 1985, he
taught “Dreaming and Psychopathology”; in February 1986, “Styles of Counter-Transference”;
and in October 1986, “The Psychology of Birth and Death.” These three seminars were based on
courses he had developed in the master’s program. He was inspired by the results of these seminars
and he envisioned a book based on them. The psychological principles and healing practices he
discussed originated from established Western and contemplative wisdom traditions which Ed felt
were the ground for the emerging field of contemplative psychotherapy. He wove together these
three major seminar topics as progressive stages for the development of the psychotherapist. First,
the study of dream psychology was the cornerstone of his theory of extreme mental states, providing

1. This journal edition can be found here: https://windhorseguild.org/legacy-project-archives/2019-journal-of-

contemplative-psychotherapy-volume-1.

13
the therapist the opportunity to see their personal mind processes laid bare. Facing one’s own mind
and its projections in sleeping and waking with fearless awareness, one then has the confidence to
enter the therapeutic relationship, which was the focus of his second seminar. Ed regarded the
topic of counter-transference as a further means for the therapist to study their own mind-in-
relationship and to explore the interplay between one’s habitual reactions to the client and natural
empathic experiences. Based on this therapeutic context, the third seminar brings one’s awareness
to transitional states, such as between sleep and awake and in the birth and death processes
underlying all experience, where one can learn to recognize embedded opportune moments of
clarity and compassion. Personal mindfulness meditation provides the continuity among these
stages, keeping the whole process fresh and alive in nowness. Ed envisioned this book, then, as
providing a progressive path for each therapist to forge their own healing discipline, which requires
a life-long effort.
In May 1986, Ed submitted the transcript of the first two seminars to Shambhala Publications
for a proposed book he titled Principles of Contemplative Psychotherapy. The publisher responded by
letter on July 23, 1986:

I’m sorry to say that the general consensus is that we should not contract the project. The initial
reaction was that the transcripts are far too rough at this point to “see” a book in there. Another
reaction that sealed our decision not to contract is that the proposed book would not be nearly
technical or detailed enough for the professional, and yet it would be too narrow and almost
esoteric for the layperson. So the market is a big question—and too hard to define (beyond
Naropa students) for us to make the commitment.

Ed was very disappointed by the publisher’s rejection. The reader will notice that soon after Ed
referenced what he felt to be a misguided critique of the material as being too “esoteric” in his third
seminar, “The Psychology of Birth and Death.” He explains that this term actually refers to the
personal, inexpressible quality of experience at the deeper levels of such teachings. His vision of
the book has remained dormant until now. The intention of the Windhorse Legacy Project is to
preserve and make this book, and everything we inherited from Ed, available for anyone interested.
We do not need a “market” to capitalize on to do so. If there is a market, or rather an urgent need
for this book, it is for more practical and inspiring information on human mental health and sanity.
It is noteworthy that we have changed Ed’s working title for this book from Principles of
Contemplative Psychotherapy to Healing Discipline as we felt his original title to be impenetrable. We feel

14
this new title captures the essence of the book as an accessible exploration of a whole new approach
to psychology and mental healing. This approach joins a compassionate intention and a coherent
knowledge base with a set of training practices that together form a true “discipline.”
The original meaning of the English term discipline is more concerned with practice and exercise
in a field of knowledge and activity than with abstract theory or doctrine. It can refer to a branch,
science, or art in its learning and educational aspect. Discipline can also have connotations of
coercion aimed at training one in orderly conduct by subordination or of punishment for a mistake
or bad deed one has committed or be apt to commit. Discipline can be exercised as harsh, rigid,
aggressive, or as gentle, pliable, life-affirming. We are using the term here in its positive, educative
meaning, qualified by the term healing which orients the discipline toward care for the health of
others.
The healing discipline Ed presents here is a way of working with people that can bring out the
intrinsic health of everyone involved, as a mutual process of learning and recovery. This is a
wakeful discipline that inspires the courage to overcome the tendency to impose a system of
coercive control over other people out of one’s own fear and ambition. I feel this is one of the great
services that contemplative psychotherapy can provide for Western therapists: to retrieve the
honorable challenge of developing true personal and occupational discipline that frees up the
human life force from the dark meanings of discipline as harsh coercion in exerting power over
others. In the contemplative wisdom traditions, there is a vast literature on discipline as the means
for developing joy, freedom, and deep relaxation. In my experience, a true discipline creates the
conditions for the natural goodness in a person to grow and mature. The actual experience of each
practitioner within the pattern of the discipline is unique and freshly emergent in each moment of
nowness. Healing discipline can provide the perspective and practices for us to work with the raw
energy of experience toward health and sanity.
It may be of interest to the reader to know of the method that Ed used to approach each of the
three seminar topics: dreaming, psychotherapy, and cycles of birth and death. Ed first explained
this method to me in 1983 in the context of helping me learn to teach his graduate course on
psychopathology. I do not recall anywhere in his writing or teaching that he explained this
approach that he widely used, although he provided numerous hints in his other writings. He told
me that each area in the course—depression, trauma, addiction, anxiety, obsessions, the
psychoses—could be approached in this way. In this course, he had us read first-person literary

15
accounts to bring each of these areas alive in our experience as the ground of study. He called these
first-person narratives parables, meaning teaching stories. He said this basic method of inquiry was
useful for conducting psychotherapy, supervision, teaching, and writing. He called this three-stage
method clinical phenomena, structure, application. I continue to find this method to be profound in its
simplicity and directness as a seamless progression for working with oneself in relationship. Here
is how I recall and have come to understand what Ed explained.
Clinical phenomena refers to making actual contact by extending one’s environmental awareness.
This allows one’s experiential field to be directly impacted and shaped by the other person,
situation, or area of inquiry. Genuine contact happens as direct experience with as few conceptual
and defensive filters as possible, with all the sensory, somatic, and feeling senses being awakened.
This is analogous to the participant-observer position of a field naturalist. One realizes one is both
entering and being entered by the situation, as dynamic interplay. One is letting oneself be
genuinely touched by the person-situation while the porousness of the situation is letting you in as
well. One realizes that contemplative practice is a training in being fully present in such a grounded
and open way. In the Windhorse clinical work we call this the skill of being present with another
person. In his “Psychotherapy” chapter in Recovering Sanity (2003), Ed refers to this as the
therapeutic skill of “sympathetic resonance”:

First, the therapist hears at more or less deep levels within him- or herself and has a taste of
the variety of emotions that the person is experiencing. That is, the therapist identifies with
the patient’s dilemma; he or she can “feel” by means of memory or imagination similar
situations in his or her own life that gives rise to the same cycle of emotions …. The
therapist’s whole range of thoughts and emotions, interest or disinterest, sadness or delight,
hope or fear, and so on, is the palette that he or she constantly scans, and that becomes the
source of energy and vitality for being in relationship. (327)

Structure refers to allowing one’s mindfulness of experience to become more subtle and detailed
as one’s natural curiosity comes alive. One begins to develop discriminating awareness of how the
phenomena functions. This is non-judgmental intuitive and intellectual insight into the key
elements and dynamic processes that comprise the patterns in motion. One is simply learning from
being in close relationship. In the discipline of intensive psychotherapy, Ed refers to this as
“sympathetic insight” (Recovering Sanity 2003, 345) which can, for example, help to clarify a pattern
of conflicting emotions a client may be stuck in. One is able to give voice to the suffering of the

16
client who has an experience of having been completely heard and felt, and that their struggle has
been appreciated. Ed develops this notion of structure further in the session on “Meaningful
Interpretation” in the “Styles of Countertransference” seminar.
Application refers to the communications and other actions one engages in with the person,
situation, or area of inquiry. Skillful action does not mean to apply a pre-determined strategy, but
rather to allow for spontaneous engagement. Action naturally flows from one’s empathic exchange
with the phenomena, from which understanding of structure emerges, and the application is how one
responds accurately to what is actually happening. Certainly, contemplative psychotherapy is not
a fixed method for how to repair damaged people, nor is contemplative inquiry a blind application
of theory that pigeonholes people into fixed categories. As Ed advises, “One needs to learn from
intimate relationships with people in psychosis about the abysmal struggle taking place within
psychotic turmoil itself” (Recovering Sanity 2003, 4). For me, application arises out of what I call
sympathetic appreciation for the dignity of the other person who is doing the best they can with what
they have. Such appreciation can feel like warm acceptance of the truth of the situation as it is. I
recall Chögyam Trungpa defined compassion as “sympathetic warmth independent of levels of
security.” The warmth and kindness of compassion allows one to make genuine contact with the
person and situation beyond one’s need for personal control and security. This naturally sparks
curiosity about the dynamic patterns, which is more likely to lead to honest action that aligns with
appreciation for what is really happening. These then are the three sympathies: resonance, insight,
and appreciation. Responsive action naturally brings further experience, feedback, insight and
more opportunities for skillful interaction. The open-ended process of healing discipline can
continue to unfold in this way.
The fact that the material in the following pages is Ed’s spoken words makes this reading more
like a person-to-person encounter. This book carries the invitation for the reader to make their
own learning relationship with Ed based on a growing familiarity, trust, and enjoyment of working
alongside him, just as I experienced. We cannot know how Ed might have rendered these
transcripts into his style of writing. He spoke very differently in teaching than he wrote. We have
carefully checked the transcripts against the original audio recordings of these three seminars.
Sufficient editing has been done to provide punctuation, coherent sentences, paragraphs, and topic
subheadings for ease of reading. The editorial team has carefully polished the rough cut of the
original transcripts to enable the book embedded here to emerge. Every attempt has been made to

17
retain Ed’s original voice and mode of expression. This book is unique in presenting his spoken
language as oral instruction, which was presented in a slow-paced rhythmic pattern—direct,
simple, and full of feeling.
On behalf of Ed, I would like to appreciate you, the reader, for your enthusiastic interest which
can breathe life back into these oral teachings. I hope you enjoy your study of this book of
challenges. May your efforts benefit yourself and those in your care as you explore this way of
healing discipline. It may just be that our world needs us this way.
I thank Ed for forging scholarship, meditation, and therapy into a path of discipline we
can walk in our own way. I thank the Managing Editor, Skye Levy, for skilled attendance to the
details of meaning. I thank Karen Kissel Wegela for writing the elegant Foreword as threshold for
readers. I thank Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, eminent spiritual friend, for gracing the cover with
Dharma art. I thank the Legacy Group, Matt Allen, Blake Baily, and Polly Banerjee Gallagher,
for constant guidance and inspiration. I thank my wife, Molly Fortuna, member of the early
Naropa and Windhorse groups, for sharing the sacred disciplines of family and household. I thank
my three adult children, Andrea, Gabriel, and Evangelynn, who are lights of a new dawn. I thank
the many generous donors to the Legacy Project, a program of the non-profit Windhorse Guild,
for bringing this book into reality. I thank my teachers, mentors, supervisors, fellow students,
colleagues, and companions for excellent friendship. Thank you all for your commitment to
bringing these legacy treasures forward to new generations of scholars, healers, and meditators,
and to those brave persons in recovery. Always remember.

July 2020
Boulder, Colorado

18
19
Dreaming and Psychopathology

20
21
 Introduction to “Dreaming and Psychopathology”
Jeffrey Fortuna

Original promotional flyer for the seminar

W e now can begin our study in earnest with this first seminar: “Dreaming and
Psychopathology.” I would like to share some personal impressions and reflections on
this text. My hope is that you will be able to engage closely with this material and experience a
renewed interest in your own dream life. For me, this particular seminar carries the feeling of subtle
movements of dream elementals on the edge of consciousness. This aura becomes more tangible
and clarified by our wish to be beside those wandering sad and alone in the dreamscapes of their
own projections.
In 1985, I served as the coordinator for this public weekend seminar, as well as attendant to
Ed’s creative process. We lived through it and both made the effort to take this learning to heart.
Those of us present at the seminar followed Ed’s lead and put into practice the dream awareness
instructions that he presented. Now, in the process of working with this manuscript, it all comes
alive again and I have been forced to go beyond a superficial, intellectual consideration of this
material. I have focused my intention to remember my dreams and extend my awareness into the
depths of sleeping and awake consciousness. I was particularly intrigued by Ed’s emphasis in the
seminar on “lucid waking.” I made this into yet another practice with three stages. As with all

22
dream awareness instructions, one begins by repeatedly setting one’s intention to do the practice.
Then during the day, spontaneous conscious moments happen that suddenly pose the question to
oneself, “Am I dreaming now or am I awake? What is the difference?” These are not yes-or-no,
binary questions. They are open questions. The result of asking them is that one simply pauses and
relaxes into that moment of open uncertainty. This can feel like a puncture in the seamless fabric
of experience that is woven by constant discursive thinking, which allows one’s awareness to open.
Wondering “Am I dreaming right now?” can be an experience of being suddenly freed from the
fixed mind of conviction that what one is experiencing now is real and not a projection. I may not
be so good at any of this, but that seems irrelevant. I am more interested in what happens if one
perseveres in the awareness disciplines that develop a lucid mind in night-dreaming and day-
dreaming. I have slowly discovered that setting the intention to wake up in all situations is key.
This seminar on dreaming and psychopathology brings together two of Ed’s life-long interests.
Having worked with Ed for twenty-five years, I saw how immersed he was in the experience and
psychology of dreaming. He developed his study of dreams during the first phase of his professional
life as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He developed further depth of experience through his
intensive meditation practice, which inspired him to promote the emerging discipline of
contemplative psychotherapy. He held Sigmund Freud in high regard, reading The Interpretation of
Dreams (1899) numerous times for personal study and for his courses on dreams at Naropa
University in the 1980s. In 1984, Ed wrote an essay for Naropa titled, “Freud’s Dreams and the
Five Competencies,” based on one of his course lectures. Ed’s first comprehensive paper on the
subject of dreams was published in 1985, “The Experience of Dreaming and the Practice of
Awareness.”2
Ed’s second primary interest was in psychopathology and the place of dream awareness in the
intensive psychotherapy of persons caught in extreme states. As a practicing physician, his interest
in dreams was always embedded in the practice of healing. In fact, his unique psychology of
psychosis, presented in Recovering Sanity (2003), is based on his respect for the process and power of
dreaming, as the following quote describes:

2. “The Experience of Dreaming and the Practice of Awareness,” first published in the Naropa Institute Journal of
Psychology, is available at www.windhorseguild.org/legacy-project-archives/dreaming-and-awareness-edward-
podvoll

23
 Almost all psychotic occurrences of whatever species (organic, chemical, situational) can be
seen to be infused with manic consciousness at their onset or as they recycle. This
consciousness is usually reported to have a dreamlike quality. Some people who have
experienced this state call it the “dream time,” the “dream world,” or the “dream
machine.” The senses of time, space, cause, and effect; the availability of memory images;
the way external perceptions are woven into the ongoing scenario; the play with words and
puns; the electrical sense of power and magic; and above all the sense of conviction in the
reality of what is in front of one’s eyes—are all marks of both manic and dream
consciousness. It could be said that manic consciousness borrows, or perhaps commandeers,
the mechanics of dreaming. (88)

As mentioned earlier, one of Ed’s primary methods for studying psychopathology was to work
with parables, or teaching stories, through “literary exchange” with first-person accounts written
by people enduring extreme states. This was both his clinical research method and singular way of
teaching. He describes this in Recovering Sanity (2003):

These [parables] are not necessarily exotic cases or cases of elite people but they are about
exceptional individuals who have the capability and talent to express and communicate the
ordinary psychotic drama. Each means to give voice to all people who have been in
psychosis and each demonstrates the clarity and intelligence available even to one in acute
confusion. Each case tells of the subjective reality of psychosis, narratives that are arduous,
painful, and possibly even dangerous to tell, such narratives have been known to agitate
one’s mind, and provoke angry criticism. Many of these people have recovered to one
degree or another and each case points to and clarifies basic principles of recovery. (7)

In particular, he writes in the chapter called “Major Ordeals of Psychotic Mind” that:

Michaux approached the drug-induced state from what could be called a “contemplative”
point of view; he was accustomed to being alone, practiced in observing states of mind, and
had precise control and poetic expression of language. (131)

In the year leading up to this seminar, Ed had discovered the work of the Marquis d’Hervey de
Saint-Denys who had published a remarkable self-study titled Dreams and the Means of Directing Them
in the mid-1860s. Since there was no English version at the time, Ed commissioned his own

24
translation. He studied this book as a parable from which he gleaned insights into lucid dreaming
and lucid waking, which he then built on.
I preserved my notes from faculty discussions with Ed during the seminar.i He explained to us
the nine-fold logic for his three presentations within the seminar, which is included below, and
outlined the ground-path-fruition for each lecture. Ed was thorough and meticulous in his
preparations for such lectures, which this logical flow summarizes. Ground (basis) is the basic
phenomenon to be explored; path (process) is the active inquiry into and practice on that basis;
fruition (outcome) is the natural result of that practice, which could be simply resting in the clarity
of basic health. The inquiry method of “clinical phenomena, structure, application” described
earlier is a variation on this more fundamental process logic of ground-path-fruition.

I: Lucid Dreaming, Lucid Waking

1. Ground: varieties of those experiences

2. Path: transitional states of consciousness
3. Fruition: lucid waking—meditation practice with instructions for the night

II: Dream Formation

4. Ground: dreams as continuous preservers of ego integrity/mechanics

5. Path: Yogacara . . . dream as basic metaphor (8 states of consciousness)
6. Fruition: winds3

III: Psychopathology

7. Ground: (exchange) “germ/seed theory” of William James—we have the seed of

any pathological state within us4
8. Path: ego buttressing
9. Fruition: rest/relaxation/emptiness

3. Terry Clifford, Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry: The Diamond Healing (1984), 129–47. Ed devoted much
attention to the study of Tibetan medicine, a thousand-year-old tradition of healing. This book, very important to
Ed and his students, explains the concept of “wind disturbances” in the context of Western psychiatry, presented
as an alternative cognitive system of diagnosis and treatment of extreme mental illness suffused with Buddhist
spiritualty. —J.Fortuna
4. William James was a very important source for Ed, and I recall his singular enthusiasm for finding this book,
which we read closely together. This is a study of how dissociated areas of mind are split off and sealed from a
narrow self-consciousness and can lead to mental illness. Taylor points out that it was James “who had said that
we are of one clay with lunatics and criminals. His import was to destroy our view of untouchability surrounding
the insane.” (William James, William James on Exceptional Mental States, ed. Eugene Taylor [1982], 5) —J. Fortuna

25
My notes also explain the approach we took to the small discussion groups, which were an integral
part of the seminar:

The basic purpose of the groups is the bare recounting of dreams with no extended
comment by group members. Appreciate the texture and fabric, the spider web, that can
fill a room. Comments, yes, but “let’s hear another dream.” Look at questions about the
lectures in the context of dreams. How to listen to dreams? An atmosphere of
accommodation, just listen, no judgement. The space of listening illuminates the dream.
This is a kind of pacification, dreams just come and go. For reporting a dream, the more
recent the better, especially in the range and context of the seminar, even since from when
one first heard about the seminar. A moment of reflection on the report and you lose the
moment of the dream. Naked dream, not too much commentary. That creates the
atmosphere. Be appreciative of telling a dream and hearing a dream in person, in public.
The ambition to teach about a dream is secondary to the colorfulness and texture of the
dream.

In 1990, Ed entered a twelve-year Buddhist meditation retreat to focus exclusively on

meditation practice, including what he called dream yoga. In a letter to me from his retreat, dated
October 12, 1993, Ed referenced this approach to dream sharing:

In dream discussion groups, where one just simply listens, uncritically, openly, non-
judgmentally, without interpretation, to dreams—then some clarity about them develops
(like we did at the Naropa dream seminar).

Ed described this kind of listening in his chapter on psychotherapy in Recovering Sanity (2003):

This invitation [for freedom of expression] also has its own crucial counterpart in the way
the therapist works with his or her own mind. The practice here is to listen to anything that
is expressed without labeling it or diagnosing it as meaning this or that. It is a
complimentary letting-go of any judgement about what one is hearing, thus relaxing a
reflex attempt to assign meaning. This is ideally the way one could listen to another person
recount the dream he or she had last night. One could listen with just a naked receptivity,
itself almost dreamlike, while one’s own associations to the dream imagery spontaneously
come and go. Usually, this is something that therapists have to practice before they can

26
 reach this level of relaxation of not having to respond. It is helpful just to listen to people
describe their dreams, with no attempt to make anything out of them, but simply to be with
them and to appreciate the texture of dream-apparition and the quality of emotions that
give the dreams their energy. (327)

The seminar you are about to read was a dynamic moment in 1985 among Ed and the
participants. Ed was fifty years old at the time. So, one cannot take this seminar as any kind of final
word or doctrine as his perspective continued to shift and grow over his subsequent years of dream
awareness practice. However, there is a thread of insight that he developed, which is something
like: let things be open and free—ungrasped. We regarded this quality of open and free as the
element of space, not as an empty vacuum, but as genuine accommodation. This element is the
gist of the fourth skill of basic attendance, Letting Be:

Letting be means that you are practicing a sense of accommodation, without trying to
change the course of things into what you think they should be. Because of the largeness of
this attitude, it is also a state of quiet mind where anything can be accepted. It is
nonjudgmental openness to whatever is happening in the patient’s mind and in your own.
This is sometimes referred to as a state of “equanimity.” When basic attendance is practiced
in this way a quality of transmission takes place that contains some ease and relaxation
takes place between you and the patient. (Recovering Sanity 2003, 272–273.)

In a letter to me from retreat, dated November 27, 2000, sixty-five-year-old Ed advised me:

Don’t worry about not remembering your dreams; according to the oral instructions for
the “dream yoga,” it’s alright if you do, but the very effort, impulse, and tendency to grasp
for it, freeze a past apparition, hold on to it, own it . . . is going in the wrong direction and
should be abandoned on the spot. So, just look into the impulse, see its nature, and
see/recognize how that same tendency is exerting its influence all the time! That
recognition causes a slight pain and confusion in the first instance but then becomes the
sadness and delight of the guru’s [wisdom] mind.

Ed’s life-long friend and colleague Paul Lippmann published an excellent book on dreaming and
psychotherapy, which is consonant with this approach to “let things be open and free”:

27
 It is not so much that one eschews interpretation, although the knowing tone can be
tiresome and offensive. Rather, one makes efforts to help create the conditions from which
interpretations will show themselves if they wish. The meanings within a dream will open
to good conversation. One literally makes the effort to enter the back and forth, in which
one thing leads to another—similar to the conditions of dream construction itself.ii

Ed’s life-long interest in dreams and psychopathology was shared by all of the elder
therapists of his tradition of intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy, beginning with Sigmund
Freud, and including Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Otto Will, and Harold Searles. They were all
dream awareness practitioners who brought all aspects of their experience to the therapy process,
just as Windhorse therapists do to this day. They developed the idea that the night dream is a
prototypical psychosis, an idea many people are uncomfortable with, but which underlies the
ancient notion that the madman is simply dreaming while awake in daily life. Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann explains:

The other type of psychological expression which is evidenced by mentally healthy, as well
as by mentally disturbed, people are the means of expression used by the mentally healthy
while asleep, in their dreams, and by the mentally disturbed while awake, in their psychotic
productions. Dreams and psychotic productions are actually analogous . . . . The dream
constitutes, as it were, a transitory psychotic process through which we all pass once within
a period of twenty-four hours.iii

Windhorse language would describe the mind in sleep as separated or desynchronized from body
and environment, which is also our understanding of the cause of psychopathology. Since we all
dream, this provides the therapist yet another valuable area of common ground with mentally
disturbed persons and an entry point for exchange with extreme states. In Windhorse, we have
continued this exploration of dreams as an obscure, often-neglected, hidden dimension of human
life and health. For example, our two-year psychotherapy training spends three months in the
dream world. The study of dreams is a path of fearless willingness to exchange with pathological
states awakened by the radical introspection and genuine experience of contemplative practice.

28
 Now that we have some shared ground, I invite you to venture with full presence into the
seminar that is about to unfold. Try to practice literary exchange by letting in with your whole
being Ed’s teaching and discussion with the seminar participants. A text like this merits repeated
readings through which deeper layers of understanding can dawn. The layers of our own mind,
while sleeping and awake and in between, will reveal themselves if we create the right conditions.

October 2020
Boulder, Colorado

29
 I.
Lucid Dreaming, Lucid Waking

I t is a pleasure to be able to talk with you about dreams. It is not often that one gets a chance
to talk about dreams. Not these days. There were times when it was a much more casual topic,
but in this day and age, the conversation is either quite academic or esoteric. On the other hand,
dreams are such a fundamental aspect of our experience that just in hearing an announcement
that they will be talked about, one starts to remember their dreams. This seems to have been an
experience that many people had in approaching this seminar, and that is not unusual. It is as if
there were a slight turning of attention to a forgotten aspect of our experience. Ignoring dreams
has not always been the case. But it is these days. The issue seems to be that we do not know what
to make out of this ubiquitous phenomenon that we have every day, every night. And hopefully
we will be able to make some kind of sense out of it together.

Wakefulness Within Dreaming

The interest in dream seems to be episodic in our culture. There was a tremendous surge of interest
in the early 1900s, again in the mid-1950s, and somewhat again in the 1980s with the phenomena
of what is called lucid dreaming. This is especially in vogue now. There are many articles and books
about the quality of the dream experience that might be described as “wakeful dream experiences.”
This has seemed to arouse a great deal of interest. It seems new to us, but in fact, it is not new—it
has never been new. This has always been a part of dream studies in the Western world since the
mid-1800s and has never been out of vogue in the Eastern world.
When the phrase lucid dreaming is mentioned, one hears a great variety of experiences that
people describe as their particular lucid dream experience. There are laboratories at universities
now devoted to the study of lucid dreaming. Highly technological and physiological research is
happening to explore this phenomena. When a discussion arises about lucid dreaming, people
seem to expect that there will be some unusual phenomena involved. People may even expect to
hear discussions of levitation in dreams, out of the body experiences, astral travel, and so on. We
will not be covering those particular phenomena here. On the other hand, what we might deal
with are the phenomena of dreams that are just as weird and perhaps more frightening.

30
 Everyone seems to have in a catalog of their wakeful dream experiences, times when they are
certain that they are dreaming while dreaming. They might use the expression at that time that
“this is only a dream.” That statement might cause an awakening, at that moment, but that
awakening might only be into another episode of the same dream or a different dream. The
experience of waking from dream into dream is not unusual and is sometimes quite painful or
startling. Other people describe the experience of lucid dreaming as the time in a dream when they
suddenly realize that they have control of the dream. They realize that they are able, at least for a
moment, to direct the course of the dream. Other people describe lucid dreaming as a time when
they are able to understand something in a dream. A moment of insight that is registered and
carried over into the active waking state. Then there occur the confusion times when one is not
sure if one is dreaming or awake. There comes an utter conviction that one is awake in the dream
only to be momentarily carried away in a torrent of dream activity. There was a news report
recently in which the comedian Steve Allen insisted that he did most of his creative work during
his dream time, and he could not understand why people do not cherish their sleeping and dream
time more. There is, in fact, every conceivable variety of experience that people are calling
wakefulness in dreams or lucid dreaming. And there is also of course a developing so-called science of lucid
dreaming.

Dream Explorers
However, everyone who has explored this territory, points to one person who was the absolute
virtuoso of lucid dreaming in the Western world. His name was the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-
Denys, a French nobleman who wrote about his dream experiences in the mid-1800s. Brought up
in a noble family in the Burgundy District of France, he was an independently wealthy scholar. By
middle age, he was a famous sinologist, as it was called then: a translator of Chinese poetry, a
historian of the Tang dynasty, and a scholar of Confucianism. Unbeknownst to most of his friends
and even family, he was a yogi of the dream world.
In the mid-1860s, he published an anonymous work called Dreams and the Means of Directing Them.
That was a time of tremendous ferment in the field of dream research. In 1857, there had been a
large symposium inviting dream scholars and dream practitioners from all over Europe to submit
their work. When the Marquis read these proceedings, he was astonished—astonished at how little
these people seemed to know. Because, since the age of fourteen, he had developed a particular

31
dream practice, with many different steps to it, that was a way of entering his dream world. He
first began practicing this at fourteen because he was painting a lot and in his painting classes, he
decided to paint his dreams. Each day he would paint the dreams that he had the night before. He
got better and better at this practice, which seemed to cause him to remember his dreams more
and more. As time went on, he developed further practices. Over a period of roughly forty years,
he developed these practices nightly. Having several dreams a night, and remembering and
entering into them clearly, he had different experiments in mind each time. At the end of these
forty years, he wrote his text. The experiences that he describes are very provocative—provocative
in terms of any dream study that presumes to be a dream psychology. We will be presenting some
of his work this weekend. One of his findings, which is not particularly new, but is interesting in
terms of his own research, was the study of partial and transitional states of consciousness. The
study of dream and the study of waking seems to be impossible without an understanding of the
in-between states of consciousness and the tremendous variety that is possible there. The Marquis
would add mixtures of sleeping and waking as a way of exploring these transitional states.5
Transitional states of consciousness were also an extremely important study in American
psychology, at somewhat the same time. This was spearheaded by William James and his students.
Slightly later on came Sigmund Freud’s study of dreams and his lifelong experience of
remembering them and working with them in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).6 The
theme of changing, shifting, fluid states of consciousness, which he describes in that book, is a
theme that has now been largely abandoned by the psychoanalytic tradition. So, we have several
streams of study and interest in the variety of states of waking consciousness as they are highlighted
by dream experience. In the Eastern world, this is nothing new.
Studies of the various and shifting states of consciousness have been an object of intense study
in the Hindu tradition since the early Vedic times, five thousand years ago. It has been a special
study in the Buddhist tradition for the past two thousand years. In both Hindu and Buddhist
traditions, there have been dream practices of many different kinds. If we are to think about our

5. This text was originally written and published in French as Les Reves et les Moyens De Les Diriger: Observatons Pratiques
(1867). The free download of the first English translation can be found at:
http://members.casema.nl/carolusdenblanken/Downloads/Hervey%20de%20Saint-Denys%20-
%20Dreams%20and%20The%20Ways%20to%20Direct%20Them;%20Practical%20Observations.pdf. —J.
Fortuna
6. Ed regarded the James Strachey’s 1953 translation of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) as the
clearest and most readable edition. —J. Fortuna

32
own dreams, and the significance of them in our own life, it is useful to understand what this great
variety of people before us have understood about their dreams. Yet, it is not as if such a study, or
such an understanding, of what people have said before will give us any real help or solution to our
own dreams—they have all said that.

Dream Awareness Practice

In working with our dream states, there is actually some personal effort involved. Nothing can take
the place of that. Everybody who has worked within dreams has put a great deal of effort into
them. This effort seems to come earlier in the process than we might have thought. For example,
there is no way to understand, or even approach, our own experience of dreams without
approaching our experience of sleep. Every dream practitioner, including the Marquis, has started
at this point: the act of falling asleep. You might take this as instruction; extract from the
experiences that these people describe and try to apply them to your own experience. For example,
it would be good if the next time you approach sleep, you could rouse the intention to observe your
mental activity while falling asleep. The idea is to bring a degree of attention to the act of going to
sleep and falling asleep. This might sound like a very easy task, but even if you remember to do it
at first, by the time you turn off the lights, you will be lucky if you are able to do it. The Marquis
said this was an extremely difficult time to hold one’s attention. Others have confirmed this. The
time between closing one’s eyes to the point of dreaming involves several—perhaps many—
different stages of consciousness. And they are very seductive stages of consciousness. At any stage,
one could be entrapped and lose one’s intention during it.
The general idea is to look for, and spot, a particular phenomenon. That phenomenon is: the
transition between thinking and imagining. Noticing the thinking is not very difficult at first, but as
the sleep progresses, there is a gradual and stepwise transition into pictorial imagining. The
thoughts themselves become pantomimes, out there, being spoken and enacted toward you. And
this seems to be a somewhat wild time of thinking. But it is a preliminary and essential first step
toward further expanding one’s awareness during dreaming, an absolutely necessary step to take:
cultivating this attention and noticing this transition between thinking and imaging. If one does
that, then one enters the chamber of dreams, so to speak, with some awareness intact. The first
thing one notices is that suddenly one or a number of others appear. The others seem to be
communicating something. There is then engagement with these others. One begins to talk to and

33
be talked to by these others. It generally takes a good deal of time and practice to get this far. But
the Marquis and others have taken it beyond this step—they arrived at an experience where they
actually felt that they were dreaming. Nobody seems to be able to put it better than that. There was
a feeling of dreaming.
When breaking down what this feeling consists of, a number of characteristics are seen. For
one thing, the imagery of the dream seems to reach a peak of intensity. If one has been able to
track the thought processes of falling asleep into the area of images replacing thoughts, one can
actually see the gradual intensification of that imagery. Color becomes brighter, form becomes
more distinct, atmosphere becomes more vivid, sound becomes clearer, touch becomes extremely
personal, and so on. That seems to be a tip-off that something else is happening, that another,
deeper, state of dream consciousness has arisen. It is at that time that one can actually perform
some experiments.
One can begin to experiment in simple ways; for example, modifying a particular image. Just
changing its shape ever so slightly or changing its color. Or one can intensify one’s thought because
that itself will give rise to the immediate appearance of the image that represents that thought. But
the basic idea is to keep one’s intention intact. That is, to keep somehow recalling to oneself,
remembering that one is dreaming. That seems to be an important part of this practice: recollecting
what one is there to do.
One of the hallmarks of this experience—the acknowledgement of being wakeful within a
dream—is the continuous oscillation between subject and object. First one is acting, and then one
is watching oneself act. First one is observing something, and then one is observing oneself
observing something. Again, that seems to be a major clue to the fact that one is in an intensified
dream state. For the Marquis, this very energy of oscillation was the basis of how all these other
practices took place and were practiced. For example, when changing the course of the dream in
the middle of it, his particular clue was to remember what he was about to do and focus his
attention on a particular detail within the dream, not necessarily even an important detail. As he
did that, the detail would fill the space of the dream and shift the scene of the dream.
He noted that sometimes he could apply almost too much attention to the dreams. If he was
too strict with himself in the dream, strange occurrences began to happen. One example is that he
would see faces transforming themselves in front of his eyes into rather ugly forms, which he
compares to hallucinogenic experiences. Basically, he found that he could make incoherent dreams

34
suddenly begin to align themselves and become coherent. He could make passionate dreams come
out to have a very good ending for him. He could make fearful dreams and nightmares completely
harmless.
The way he did the latter was somewhat of the reverse of his experience of falling asleep. A
fearful image would occur and he would focus attentively on the details of that imagery until the
point where they became progressively transparent and because of the fading imagery, he could
recognize what he called the emptiness of the illusion and the fear dissipated immediately—all still
within the dream itself. As he got better and better at this, he actually began to remember a
previous dream experience within a current dream experience, and would then bring that previous
experience to life in the current dream, as if he were telescoping dreams into each other. A pretty
good trick. Other times, he found himself confronting demons and monsters, even bringing them
on in a tournament and challenge. But his old, standby mechanism—which might be familiar to
more recent descriptions of lucid dreaming—is that he trained himself to be able to bring his hands
to his eyes in the middle of the dream, thereby interrupting the continuity of the dream image and
changing the course of the dream from that point on. Sometimes he was appalled that the dream
kept on going after he took his hands away, but usually he could produce a completely new scene
of the dream as soon as he blocked out the image. From beginning to end, his goal was to have an
understanding, a sense of recognition, that this was only a dream.
Now we say that all the time, “This is only dream.” We say that so many times in waking life.
“This can’t really be happening. I shouldn’t be taking this too seriously.” And we know when we
are dreaming, we occasionally have that thought—this is only a dream. For a brief moment, it seems
to allay the particular anxiety of the dream. But the dream psychologists are saying that the fullest
expression and meaning of the insight, the understanding, that this is only a dream, is arrived at
after a great deal of practice. A great deal of effort is a prerequisite for it to be an actually
meaningful statement and not just a momentary tranquilizer.

Lucid Waking
The interest in wakeful dreaming, or lucid dreaming, that is occurring these days is strange, in a
way. So many people are so interested in lucid dreaming, but not that interested in lucid waking.
And, we would like to know, why is this so? Why is this odd phenomena of lucid dreaming, which
is esoteric to a degree, captivating American psychologists? One reason is that the pyrotechnics

35
involved in lucid dreaming and the seeming research potentialities involved in it are interesting to
them. But what has come out of the lucid dream research is well known by these psychologists to
be nothing compared to what the Marquis had achieved. All the time the Marquis pointed to the
fact that all his research added up to an understanding on his part that thinking is dreaming. He says,
“the principle that thinking at something means to dream about it”—a cryptic remark. All of his
dream research led him to the final conclusion that thinking is inseparable from the imaginative
state of dreaming, that there is no thinking without images, that they arise together, and that
consciousness of the two arises simultaneously. In the end, he came to believe that in order to
understand dreams further, further research on the thinking process needed to take place. This
was somewhat the same conclusion that Freud reached in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud
broke off his study of dreams with a beginning study of the nature of consciousness. What is the
difference between consciousness in dreams and consciousness in active waking? Is there a
difference? Is there a difference between lucid dreaming and lucid waking?
We know from studies of transitional and partially formed states of mind that a great deal of
our waking consciousness is shot through with dream-like phenomena. We usually use the word
daydreaming quite casually, but we know that it has a variety of intensities: it could be subliminal to,
at most, hallucinatory. So just as we know that there could be lucid dreaming and wakeful states
within dreaming, we also know that there could be dream states within waking. The two
interpenetrate. There are a great number of states of mind, which could be cataloged as to the
degree of trance-like phenomena taking place in them, and the degree to which one is consciously
aware that one is in a trance-like state. An awareness takes place of not only one’s thought
processes, but occasionally of the external world around one. Surgeons now are very careful about
what they say during surgery, since in the deepest stages of neurological coma, the patient can still
have perceptions, and later describe those. There seems to be no state of life in which one cannot
find a degree of conscious awareness. In a sense, lucid dreaming and wakeful states of consciousness
mixing with any other state is now so well known, so documented, that one has to ask: what is this
consciousness that seems to be so indestructible? That may seem like somewhat of an academic or
philosophical question, but it is a poignantly important question.
The clinical implication of all this is this question: how do we recognize, understand,
encourage, and cultivate this wakeful state of consciousness—no matter what condition oneself or
another is in?

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 Now as you will see the next time you go to sleep, it is difficult to try to track the passage of
thinking into the imagery as it progresses into a full-blown dream. One’s attention wavers and it
obviously could be strengthened. Attending to details within the dream itself will seem like a
superhuman task. So one needs to train somewhat before that actually takes place. The training
that we do in contemplative psychotherapy—the training that is so obviously useful—is
mindfulness-awareness meditation practice, which becomes the basic training ground to cultivate
awareness in any other state of mind. It alone, at least in its simplest possible form, allows one to
cultivate and strengthen awareness of details, discrimination between thoughts, and discrimination
between thoughts and images that are necessary to cultivate this kind of conscious awareness in
both ordinary and extreme states of mind. As one strengthens this awareness, one can recognize
the very seedlings of such awareness in other people, even if they are not aware of their awareness.
As one learns how to do this, through the practice of meditation, one learns how to translate
varieties of such practices into other people’s lives so they on their own can cultivate and expand
their conscious awareness in whatever state of mind they might happen to be—whether it be severe
obsession, hysterical dissociation, or frank hallucinations.
So, in working with people in contemplative psychotherapy in particular, the issue of lucid
dreaming is not just a fad; it has important parallels to actually helping other people. Helping other
people gain and strengthen their awareness during any state of mental turmoil they might be in.
In the next session, I will present a whole other view of consciousness that arises from the Buddhist
tradition and how that compares to the dream studies of Freud. That will be an interesting
comparison that will highlight this issue of consciousness.

Student: I’d like to know if they have done work in the transition state that occurs upon
awakening and the dreaming that seems to occur there.
Ed: That is again something I was going to deal with as we continue. If you think remembering
to be attentive on falling asleep is difficult, being attentive to awakening happens even more
quickly, but not in an any less decisive way. In terms of the reversal of the process, there are definite
stages of waking up from the images at the peak of intensity during which one recognizes and feels
the dream state. The intensity of the images begins to fade; they become more translucent; and, as
thoughts take over, one sees the actual replacement of images by thought. The whole thing happens
in reverse. And it seems to be a valuable effort to try to do that, though it is slightly off the point

37
and slightly encumbered and difficult to do. Meditation practice would be much easier, but it is an
interesting application of one’s attention and discriminating abilities.

Student: Sometimes people talk about the brain in terms of parts of it being relatively older than
other parts. Is there any correlation between parts of the brain, their developmental history, and
where dreaming and wakefulness occur? Does one seem to be an older process than another?
Ed: Every part of the brain is involved in dreaming. Nothing is left out. In terms of where
dreaming begins, some people say it begins in one part of the brain. Some people say chemicals
are released from another part of the brain. Something is happening in the brain, there is no doubt
about that. This brain is the basic switchboard of the whole thing, you know. It is the supporting
basis of everything we call mind in our usual sense of that being dreaming, fantasizing, imagining,
and wakening. It seems to be very difficult to do without a brain. But, on the other hand, massive
parts of the brain can be destroyed with all of the things we have talked about so far taking place
without interruption. Just how much of the brain can be destroyed before all of it stops seems to
be a matter of speculation. To give an image for this issue, the early neuropsychologists described
how they took a chimpanzee and did serial operations on the animal, taking only small parts of the
brain out over a long period of time, and they found that almost nothing was interrupted even
though there was only a third of a brain left. This is very weird area. The brain is very plastic and,
given enough time and energy and training, a large part of the brain is capable of performing the
activities of many other parts of the brain. It is a very plastic situation. It is a switchboard and, if
you do it correctly, you can change the wiring. The whole issue of dreaming naturally brings up
that one is caught between the world of physicalists and the world of mentalists. Mentalists say
there is only mind; mind is all you need. Physicalists say there is no such thing as mind and reduce
everything to brain chemistry, anatomy, and physiology. But we are talking about experience—
the experience of waking, experience of falling asleep, experience of dreaming. We do not need to
rely too much on brain physiology to be able to work with that. I don’t think I answered your
question, but actually, I didn’t intend to.

Student: I’m wondering if this is the same as meditation. In meditation, when I bring my
awareness into a thought, it seems to stop the thought. I seem to experience that also with dreams.
If I become aware that I am dreaming, it also stops the dream—somehow, I seem more awake. It
may be one of those states you were speaking of earlier: you think you are awake but you are

38
actually just waking into another dream. My question is, how do you work with that? It seems to
me that there are levels of awareness too, where the awareness is not so strong that it will wake you
up. Can you understand what I am saying?
Ed: That when you dream, and you are aware that you are dreaming, it seems to stop the
dream?
S: Yes, it seems to wake me up. I would think it would wake me up.
Ed: You think it would wake you up. In the dream.
S: Well, it has before. Before, when I have had an awareness that I am dreaming, I am awake
at that point. Or maybe I am just aware? I don’t know.
Ed: That is an important question.
S: Okay, but that also seems to have changed the dream.
Ed: Let us do this again. You are in the middle of a dream and suddenly you have a feeling that
you are awake in this dream.
S: I am having a knowledge that, an awareness that, this is a dream, just a dream.
Ed: That this is a dream.
S: Right. At that point, that feeling is that I am awake.
Ed: Right.
S: I am wondering how one can continue through a dream with that kind of awareness because
that seems to . . . there is that oscillation, yet for me it is so dramatic. It isn’t refined to the point
that I can just keep on dreaming and oscillate into awareness.
Ed: When you have this feeling that you are awake, what happens then?
S: I don’t remember. I think either, “I’m awake and I’m thinking about it as an awake person”
and then it is something else, or else I just go back into dreaming again. And then I might just
remember that little blip, later on.
Ed: So, how is that different from meditation that you started with?
S: Well, it seems the same because when I become aware of thinking, that thought also sort of
loses its steam.
Ed: Right. Then what happens?
S: There is a gap and then something else happens. It is hard to stay with. I would love to just
be able to stay with the thought with awareness. But it does not seem to happen that way. Do you
see what I mean? Let the thought keep going?

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 Ed: Which thought?
S: Yes, right. Tricky! Well, then it is the next thought. I guess awareness in a dream is changing
the dream, as it is aware.
Ed: Right. And then what happens?
S: Then it just goes on that way.
Ed: Right.
S: But it is different than dreaming without being aware. Or maybe we are aware, because the
dream is changing anyway.
Ed: The dream is constantly changing. We know that. Scenes change, faces change, suddenly
you are in a different place. Something is very important to you and then suddenly it is not very
important to you. You cannot keep complete attention on exactly what you are doing without
something being undermined in the drama of it. It is pretty much the same as waking. Except there
is a difference.
S: Yes.
Ed: That was good.

Student: I feel like what I am hearing is that the attempt to interpret dreams is missing the boat
somehow. Which is news to me. Is that what you are saying?
Ed: What do you mean by “interpret dreams”?
S: Listening to a dream. Waking up in the morning and looking at the different characters and
seeing how they affect your life and how they reflect your life. It sounds much more interesting to
find out how to get in the dream and develop your consciousness within the dream than to try to
do something with it.
Ed: It is much more interesting. But is there any particular thing that you are interested in in
terms of the dreaming drama content of it?
S: No. Up until this moment, that has been the interesting thing about dreams: interpreting
them. “Oh boy, I got some information out of that.” Or have somebody else tell me the information
they got from my dreams. But what I am hearing you say, very matter-of-factly, is that it is much
more interesting to develop your consciousness in all states of consciousness instead of just being
awake. So, the emphasis here is not on the big craze, which is interpreting dreams.

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 Ed: Right, that is what we are highlighting in this session. In the next one, we will talk a bit
more about the content of dreams and how that content arises. We will get into some of that. But,
which is more interesting to you, the dream drama or to wake up?
S: Well, you are opening up a whole other fascinating world about dreaming: it is not only
interpreting dreams now, it is also participating in them, which is very interesting to me. So, no, I
am not more interested in one more than the other. You have shown me the other side.
Ed: Well, actually, the dream drama is pretty interesting.
S: It has been so far! You know, the energy I have put into interpreting—it has been pretty
interesting.
Ed: But it doesn’t turn out to be anything different than our waking lives.
S: Yes, I think that is pretty exciting.
Ed: That is exciting?
S: Cheap thrills!
Ed: We will see if we can discuss more of this later.

Student: Regarding the Marquis’ comment that “thinking is dreaming,” you discussed that
continuum between thinking and imaging and said that a key point in beginning to train in
becoming more aware, is to notice the transition, the transition between thinking and imaging.
Can you clarify where to look in terms of experiencing that transition?
Ed: Falling asleep. Whether it is falling asleep at night or during the day, whether it is falling
asleep right here, falling asleep when you pull the covers up, or falling asleep in the moment—the
same thing happens. Except it is much more exaggerated in the transition between waking and
sleeping at night. The situation seems to be spread out over a longer period of time and is much
more highlighted. But wherever we fall asleep, it is the same thing.
S: What I am asking has to do with more of a definition of imaging as opposed to thinking.
Perhaps hearing that would help clarify how to recognize—like when one is first given meditation
instruction, one is taught to say thinking when you recognize your thoughts. Then you begin to
examine that experience and it becomes very personal to you and you can find more and more
subtler gradations of that. That is what I am asking for.
Ed: Generally, we think of thinking as having a quality of speech involved in it. Some quality
of words is intertwined with the sensation of thinking. In the case of imaging, it is virtually without
words—that is why I called it pantomime. Suddenly someone is there gesturing toward you. No

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words, but it is very meaningful, a sense of display, of gesture. It is exactly what you meant by the
words you were saying before the pantomime appeared. This is known as a literal translation. That
is the very beginning step. There is actually a term for this: hypnogogic phenomena.

Student: Studying dreams to the extent that Freud did, doesn’t that disrupt the quality of sleep?
I mean, would you feel rested when you woke up in the morning?
Ed: I’m not sure that I understand what you mean. “The way Freud did?”
S: Or if anyone started studying their dreams.
Ed: Well, it’s true that some people describe a transient insomnia. They seem to be people,
however, who have put a tremendous amount of effort into it right off and tried very hard. But I
don’t think that is a general phenomenon at all. I think I see what you mean; not in terms of Freud,
but in terms of the Marquis. Freud did not dabble in this; he was working just after the fact, all the
time, after the fact. It was one of his problems. Maybe it seems like a dilemma—if you were to be
really wakeful and attentive to your mental state, then how could you fall asleep at all? Don’t worry
about it. It will happen. In fact, if you have insomnia beforehand, it is probably helpful or beneficial
to your state of insomnia to be more attentive. In the early phases of insomnia, you probably would
be more likely to have a good rest and sleep than if you were not attentive to the wildness of your
mind in the early stages of insomnia. It is paradoxical. That is the way it seems to work.

Student: I want to try to clarify the last question a little bit, at least, around what it brought up
for me. The Marquis obviously developed a lot of awareness in his sleep and yet was still sleeping.
How did that awareness affect the quality of his sleep? He was not an insomniac, but he was a lucid
dreamer, or an aware sleeper.
Ed: I don’t know.
S: He did not report on that at all?
Ed: No. He certainly slept a sufficient amount. Just to give an example, he reported one
hundred dreams of the hands-over-the-eyes experiment, so, prodigious sleeping.
S: So, the state that he was experiencing was effective as sleep? Also, was he aware of the
transition phases between dreams?
Ed: Between dreams—you mean different phases of the particular dream, or completely
separate dreams?
S: Yes, completely separate dreams.

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 Ed: There is always an awakening after a dream, always a transient awakening. You may not
remember it, but the machines will remember it.
S: A full move out and into awakening?
Ed: Full wakefulness. In order to dream again you have to pass again through the stages of
falling progressively into deeper sleep.

Student: With regard to the Marquis’ practice of modifying dreams, it sounds very exciting that
there was a dramatic impact on the nature of the dreams themselves in which he could eliminate
fear. Did he note any particular effect on the waking state, particularly in terms of helpful effects, or
therapeutic effects, in terms of day-to-day functioning?
Ed: The parts that have been translated so far do not make much mention of that. Though
there are people who are experimenting with lucid dreams at Stanford, and elsewhere, who are
talking about a vague sense of that healthiness that comes from this practice, but they do not seem
to specify anything. But what if—and this is complete speculation—the practice of wakefulness
within the dream state actually strengthens their capability of rousing that wakefulness and
remembering to wake up, to say, “this is just a dream”? If that learning can carry over into wakeful,
active waking life, then it would seem to be healthy. They would be less identified with the
phantasmagoria of their mind in waking life.
S: That makes a lot of sense. It sounds very optimistic, hopeful even, in terms of its potential
for treatment.
Ed: It is very roundabout.
S: Yes. Although, given the number of unconscious images that go on all the time, the more we
can be in touch with that in our wakeful state and the more we can be aware of the irrational
element of it, the more we can be at peace with ourselves.
Ed: Right. Basically, discriminating between wakefulness and daydreaming. Wakefulness in
dreaming, wakefulness in daydreaming, to the extent that you can do that, seems to be one of the
basic definitions of health. The seeds of health.

Student: I am curious that you haven’t mentioned Carl Jung and his work with dreams. I am
wondering if you can tell us how your approach is similar to, or different from, his?
Ed: I have no idea. It has been many years since I’ve been involved with Jungian studies and I
don’t know what he says about wakefulness in dreams and wakefulness in any other state. There

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are a lot of people I left out. Emanuel Swedenborg was an unbelievable dream cosmonaut. And
many others, like Black Elk. His ideas about dreaming from his particular Sioux Native American
tradition was far vaster than Jung’s or Freud’s. We are leaving out a lot of dream traditions.
S: What might you say about the idea that is sometimes bandied around that a dream is a gift
from the unconscious mind that could be, say, a corrective to our conscious way?
Ed: The dream explorers are not finding that to be true. The waking-dream people are not
finding them to be such coherent messages. But, this truly depends on where one’s waking state of
mind is and what it is involved with. It is true that the dream is in some way a reflection of waking
life. It may be an ugly reflection. It may be a corrective reflection. In other words, it may point out
the difference between what one sees in waking life and what one sees in the dream, and that
discrepancy may point to something that is either neurotic, or helpful, etc. But there are a lot of
other issues involved in this. When we talk later more about consciousness and the particular
Buddhist theory of consciousness as it evolved in the Mahayana tradition, we may get more ideas
about that. But we need to work up to that.

I should caution you about this practice for the next time you go to sleep, if you would like to
do it—watching the phases of sleep and the transition from waking to sleep and from sleep to
dream—it is very difficult to do if you are extremely tired. So, it would be helpful to go bed slightly
before the time when you feel it is absolutely mandatory. Give a slight break before that. Any kind
of extreme substance use will make it impossible. Another way to put that is: the practice of
awareness of going to sleep actually means that you have to rest correctly. You may have to
completely look at your notion of what it means to rest. Rest yourself and relax yourself in an
entirely new way. It requires a proper degree, or a proper sense, of rest in order to maintain your
awareness and attention to this degree. So, think of that also. Sweet dreams.

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45
 II.
Dream Formation

T o review for a moment what we have talked about so far: that it is possible, with a great deal
of effort and self-discipline, to break into the dream world. One of the Marquis’ practices
was, in an effort to demonstrate his command over the dream world, to focus in on one particular
image and attempt to multiply it ten, fifteen times. This breaking in is not a manufactured event,
although it is a manipulated event. It is not manufactured in the sense that the mechanism to do that
is already there, blatantly there, and is exercised by particular practices that were alluded to before.
The question then remains: what is this latent capacity, this latent mechanism, that is being
utilized and manipulated? The Marquis and others have called it some kind of awareness, some
kind of consciousness. The word consciousness has been used a lot, in a lot of different ways, in current
and past psychological traditions. There are all kinds of uses: mental states, mental states of
consciousness, states of mind, altered states, exceptional states, and so on. All of these seem to be
describing qualities of consciousness or characteristics of particular experiences of consciousness. I
would like to talk now about different ways we could consider this thing that we call consciousness. It
is a long story. I will try to make it brief.

Uncertainty and Conviction of Reality

First, you might look at the practice that was suggested before—following a train of thought into
its development into imagery and seeing what the further extensions of that might be. One of them,
that the Marquis pursued diligently and felt was a cornerstone of his preliminary practices, was to
follow the train of thought through imagery right into the dream. That is the theme: that the
content of the waking thought could be tracked, in spite of its transformation into imagery, and to
recognize it as continuing a fixed idea or even obsession. That was an important practice that he
did and that he could do not because he was making it happen, but because it did happen,
naturally. What we dream about is what we are actively thinking about in waking.
In spite of all our vast variety of experiences of being awake in dream, there is a conviction of
reality that we have in a dream—there is a conviction in the reality of the appearances before our
eyes. In a sense, that is the overwhelming characteristic of dream life. This conviction of reality is

46
usurped only by waking up. We do not know that we have had a false conviction in reality until
the contrast appears. Then we look back and say, “Oh yes, I must have been dreaming,” or, “Yes,
I must have been daydreaming.” But the sense of reality is extremely relative. It is relative to what
comes next. It is not relative to what has come before, because if what seems more real right now
than what seemed before, then what happened before is generally forgotten. In other words,
whatever the more poignant experience and conviction of reality is, it puts aside, or ignores, the
experience of reality that we were so convinced of a moment ago, or an hour ago. That no longer
seems as real as it did then because what appears now seems to be more real. If you think that is
funny logic, that is the logic that takes place in dreams and especially immediately upon waking
from dreams.
The conviction of reality has a number of characteristics, not all of which can be so clearly
specified. The characteristics have to do with vividness of sense perceptions, meaningfulness of
events as one follows another, events performing according to our expectations, having feelings in
relationship to the events in accord with our habit of having feelings toward things, and so on.
These characteristics allow us to say, “This seems to be real.” And we have a number of different
criteria, standards, yardsticks, and reference points that make us say, “This is real and this is
unreal.”
The early investigations of dream phenomena within the psychoanalytic tradition and the
particular practices that they (especially Freud) evolved, focused on dissecting a dream after it
happened. They explored the scenario or story line that happened during the time that the dream
manifested, which gave rise to a certain number of insights about dream formation. The conviction
in reality during the dream seemed to be strongly linked to the conviction of one’s own sense of
life, one’s own survival, one’s own integrity, one’s own intactness. And it was clear and repeatable:
if one follows the same method of dissection (or, as Freud called it, analysis of the dream), then at least
on the surface of it—and certainly as a guiding principle of the dream formation—the scenario
and the events that took place were in the service of maintaining, fortifying, and supporting a sense
of oneself. Oneself as undamaged, uninsulated, and better put together than one had thought of
during the day before the dream. It was basically self- or ego-buttressing activity that took place in
the dream. The mechanics of this were clearly delineated by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1899). It is a complicated and long story, these mechanics, but they can be checked out and verified
freshly. They have to do with things described as displacement, condensation, symbolization, path

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of least resistance toward visual representation, and secondary revision—which is the attempt to
bring things into a coherent, expectable, logical, seemingly logical series of events. Anyone can
practice these by following his recommendations as to how to analyze and dissect the manifest
content of the dream. That is not our purpose now.
Our focus, rather, is that in the process and transition between waking and sleeping, and then
between sleeping and dreaming, and then between dreaming and waking, there are a great variety
of transitional states—states that one could define, if one made the effort. It is interesting, though,
that with all those transitions, we go to sleep and we dream and we wake up and we are still the
same person. We seem to be the same person who went to sleep in spite of the drama that happened
during the night. Many have called this phenomenon a stability of consciousness. Our consciousness
remains the same, in spite of the fact that we may be more or less conscious, more or less aware of
the fact that we are in a dream state. When we wake up, at least grossly speaking, we do not seem
to have any problem with thinking that we are the same person. When we look more closely at the
situation, there are definitely times that we wake up and are not certain that we are the same person.
In the sense that we are not certain that the events that took place during the night didn’t actually
happen. Sometimes that occurs only momentarily, with a sense of shock. Sometimes after
particularly vivid dreams, it lasts for a long time and there is a sense of suspicion. When children
have vivid dreams, it may take some of them many days to check out and assure themselves that
the events that happened during the dream did not actually happen. And there are many other
states of mind where similar things occur—there is a confusion between the illusion of the dream
and the waking reality.
It is these kinds of phenomena and others that have led dream investigators of all kinds to
question exactly what the difference was between dream and waking, active life. A great suspicion
has been implanted because of the investigation of dream phenomena. If we think of the Marquis
as an explorer of lucid dreaming, then we might also look to people who have explored lucid waking.
If one could raise one’s awareness during the night, one certainly should be able to do such a thing
during active, waking life. The Marquis and others who have explored dream life seem to be
coming up with a particular view of consciousness, but those that have explored lucid waking have
described a different view of consciousness—different in some respects and similar in others. If the
Marquis was a hero of lucid dreaming, we might think of some others as the heroes of lucid waking.

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Eight States of Consciousness
The particular lucid waking heroes that I would like to refer to and lean on are those practitioner-
scholars of the fourth century AD who made elaborate descriptions of consciousness based in the
Buddhist tradition after extensive meditation practice and study. They evolved a school and a
tradition of describing waking consciousness that is known as the Yogachara tradition. It flourished
extensively from the fourth century AD until the present. You could say the heroes of that
particular school were Vasubandhu and another who was known at the time as the Lord Asanga,
who went into twelve years of retreat sometime in his early twenties. When he emerged, he began
to teach extensively. By the time Lord Asanga died, it was said that he had cultivated and
supervised the training of three hundred thousand Mahayana monks in a vast variety of
monasteries. His writings at that time gave rise to elaborate descriptions of the nature of
consciousness.
According to the Yogachara school, there are eight states of consciousness—one evolving out
of the other in a continuous series of moments.7 The eighth consciousness is said to be the finest
and the subtlest. It is the ground of all the other states of consciousness; it is that from which all
experience, all appearances, arise. The eighth consciousness is called, in a loose translation, the
storehouse consciousness, or the receptacle consciousness, that which holds all experience, that which
accommodates everything. It holds the seeds of all the past, present, and future experiences. The
seeds that it holds are called bijas, meaning “seeds” or “germs.” You might consider them like little
molecules of DNA that are capable, given the right conditions, of coming to life or sprouting. Out
of that eighth consciousness evolves what is known as the seventh consciousness, which might be
called more like the imaginative consciousness. Better yet, the projective consciousness.
The seventh consciousness seems to come directly out of the moment of the eighth
consciousness and looks back upon the eighth consciousness as something real, as its object. This
seventh consciousness is said to have two characteristics. First: anything that is, or has the quality
of, consciousness can perceive and discriminate—as though this seventh (or projected
consciousness) perceives and discriminates qualities of the eighth consciousness. Second: the
seventh consciousness is said to be very foggy. There is almost a sense of confusion about it, or
perhaps what we might conventionally call dreaminess.

7. See “Rediscovering Your Own Mind,” chapter 37 of The Profound Treasury of The Ocean of Dharma: The Path of
Individual Liberation (2013), volume I, by Chögyam Trungpa. This is an expanded presentation of the eight types of
consciousness, with a special emphasis on the personal practice of meditation. —J. Fortuna

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 The seventh consciousness evolves immediately into the first six consciousnesses. The first five
of the six consciousnesses have to do with the five special senses of sight, hearing, smelling, tasting,
and touching. The sixth consciousness, however, which evolves immediately out of the seventh,
perceives and discriminates thoughts, mental contents. It is not as if the eighth consciousness is an
underlying basic substratum of everything that is going on in the sense that it is continuous; it is
not—it is momentary. But it is momentary continuance. It is said to be like a perpetually evolving,
torrential river. All of these consciousnesses have metaphors attached to them because it has been
said that mind cannot be approached directly. There is no real analogy for this thing that we call
mind, but there are metaphors for the different qualities and experiences of mind. So, the sixth
consciousness is what we consider to be the front of the whole thing—that which is between us and
out there. But, in fact, from this point of view, the eighth consciousness is evolving into the seventh,
evolving into the sixth, and then depending on the conditions of the eyes, ears, nose, and so forth,
and the external forms of colors, sounds, and smells, the other five will develop.
In a sense, this is somewhat of a turnabout of what one ordinarily, conventionally considers to
be how consciousness arises. We say that something out there hits us. We see it, notice it, categorize
it, store it, and retrieve it at will. But it does not quite happen that way in dreams at all. This view
of consciousness was heavily based on the metaphor of the dream; whole worlds are being created
with our eyes closed and our ears closed in full conviction of reality and then we act in them with
complete expectation that we are in the real world, so to speak. From the viewpoint of the eight
states of consciousness, the world begins and evolves out of the eighth consciousness, is projected
by the seventh consciousness directly into the first six consciousnesses, playing them like a keyboard
and producing the appearances of sight, sound, smell, and so on. Every action that we perform on
the basis of such an illusion—whether it be an action of body or an action of speech (in terms of
communicating with that illusion), or an action of mind and having thoughts (in terms of
association with that illusion)—feed back into the eighth consciousness in a kind of a
servomechanism or feedback mechanism. This feedback then produces further movement waves,
so to speak, in the eighth consciousness, out of which the seventh consciousness arises, and so on.

Self-Conscious Mind as Dream

It is a pretty good explanation of how dreams arise as well. Although, on the other hand, the whole
system seems something like a dream, like something somebody dreamed up. And that is, in fact,

50
the final conclusion of the Yogachara system: that mind itself is a dream. That there is no such
thing as “mind.” It is a dream having very definite, predictable, and repeatable characteristics. In
fact, you could say that mind is an obsessively recurrent, momentary dream.
There are other kinds of descriptions of consciousness as well. Freud, in fact, made a very
limited, slightly half-hearted attempt to describe the nature of consciousness. He described it as a
microscope system with a series of lenses, one after another, interposed between inner world and
outer world. Somehow, the microscope looked at outer world and recreated it through the lens
system into a whole series of virtual images—not real, but virtual, the way microscopes and
telescopes actually work. One image is set up in between the lenses and worked with, one after
another. There is nothing materially there when you take apart a microscope, it is only lenses and
space. But optical images are formed in the space between the lenses. No one can verify the images,
but all kinds of optical experiments demonstrate that that is what is happening. In a sense, that
seems like a dream.
The basic conclusion of the description of the eight states of consciousness I think has been best
stated by Ösel Tendzin8 who says, “There is a world that does not exist in your own mind.” He
then takes it slightly further and says, “There is a mind that does not exist in your own mind.” It is
a slightly punishing recognition, but it seems that all the drama and scenarios of dream life support
his conclusion a great deal.
There is an interesting point of overlap or connection between the description of the eight states
of consciousness in the Yogachara school and in Freud’s own meta-psychology of dreaming. That
is: the dream structure or scenario is patently, on its surface, in the service of self-justification, self-
reinforcement. It is also said that the seventh consciousness, because of a great deal of prior
conditioning, is in the service of establishing a sense of ego. It does this in a very primary way.
When I said the eighth consciousness evolves into the seventh consciousness, it does so because
there is a movement in the eighth consciousness toward projecting—toward something objective,
something out there. It does not specify it; it is a slightly confusing issue. It is the seventh
consciousness that says, “This object, this sense of projectile-ness, this sense of objectivity, is an
actual thing.” It is the seventh consciousness that gives this thing animation, a sense of life, and a
sense of reality. It is the next six that give it color, form, and so on. The seventh consciousness gives
it this sense of separate existence from where it came from because its tendency is to see self-

8. Ösel Tendzin was the vice president of Naropa University during the time of this seminar. —J. Fortuna

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complete, true existence in every projection. It is the same thing that gives life, vitality, objectivity,
and certainty that the people we confront in our dreams are really others—others to be dealt with,
others to be engaged with. So, it is the very aspect of the seventh consciousness—that which
animates and gives the certainty of self-existence to a projected illusion—that seems to be a
powerful aspect of dream life. There are not many conditions under which the seventh
consciousness ceases its confusing activity. But it has been said, and repeatedly demonstrated, that
meditation practice to the point where one achieves some degree of mind stabilization, will quiet
the seventh consciousness. This allows one to not believe so strongly, and with such certainty, in
the appearances that one has evolved and projected. The six consciousnesses can go pretty easily:
severe concussions or comas, for example, can seemingly knock them out of commission.

Consciousness as Bodily Winds

There is another model, another theory, that might have the quality of a dream as well. You could
say this is more like the medical model of consciousness. It arises from the medical traditions of
ancient Indian or Ayurvedic Tibetan Bon medical traditions, Buddhist medical traditions, Chinese
medical traditions, and so on. They all have a particular common point of meeting that talks about
consciousness as being synonymous with what are called winds, winds that travel through the body.
The winds travel in very structured channels and there is a whole anatomy of the channels that are
the supports for such winds. In this sense, the winds are inseparable from the action of mind itself.
The winds can be extremely tumultuous, which is more or less related to what we would call a
tumultuous or speedy mind. The winds may be scattered throughout the channels, or the winds may be
quieted and brought into the central channel.
In fact, there is an intricate description of the movements and qualities of the winds while in a
state of dreaming. The first movement is in the state of sleeping; it is said that the winds begin to
gather toward the central channel, which runs through the body somewhat like the spinal cord. At
a certain point in the transition between sleeping and dreaming, the winds seem to dissolve into
the central channel. At a certain point, early in the dream phenomena, the winds are completely
quiescent and absorbed into a certain part of the central channel, and so on. Again, this might
seem like somebody’s dream. It has turned out to be, in that medical tradition, a useful dream.
There are all kinds of useful treatment interventions based on this model in terms of diet, behavior,

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and relationship to one’s mind. All kinds of herbs and remedies of every sort for many different
disease states are based on an understanding of the movement or non-movement of these winds.

Reorientations: Waking Life, Waking Dream

So, we have many different styles and methods of describing states of consciousness, but they all
seem to come to the same conclusion: this thing that we are calling mind is, itself, a dream. It dreams. The
dream dreams. The dream not only dreams, but sometimes the dream dreams that it wakes up
when it is only dreaming. We wake up from dream, into dream, into dream, and finally think we
are awake, back in our good, old bed. Then an elephant walks across the floor, and we know we
are back in the dream again. There are people who, during particularly intense states of their life,
go through experiences like that, day in and day out. They have a vivid impression of the
continuous quality of a dream in our conventional, so-called waking life. The study of the
Yogachara system is meant to be a practice of understanding that what we call our waking reality
with such certainty is only but another dream within a larger dream. And that when we dream at
night, it is only a smaller blip of a dream within the context of our active, waking dream.
Some people get very disconcerted by this, but do not worry, you will quickly recover. Falsely.
But you will recover, and that recovery is called reorientation.9 We can get disoriented, but we
reorient pretty quickly. We have got all the mechanisms and habits to do it. For example, we fall
asleep, the body is dropping away, sometimes pretty quickly, and we can actually feel it—thud,
senses are closing off, it is getting dark, and your hearing is getting muffled. Whatever we do hear
is being totally transformed into something else other than what is being said to us, for example.
Our bodily feelings are no longer what they used to be, moments ago, but they are having aspects
of color and movements of gas or water. Body is becoming separated from mind in the process of

9. Ed describes Reorientations in Recovering Sanity (2003) as one of the micro-operations of the second state (the micro-
unconscious):
In the normal state, we may notice that we have casually glanced at our watch for no apparent reason. That is
only the tip of the iceberg of what we ordinarily do in the microunconscious. The one in the second state
discovers himself invoking micro-orientations to trace, to recall, to grasp, to fix, to predict, to recapture a sense
of place—many times a minute. He tries to find shelter. But over and over again, in hundreds of ways, he
keeps losing track of it. This repeated orienting of himself, this abrupt and incessant taking of coordinates, is
like a continual tic movement of the mind.
These ordinarily silent operations of reorientation and realignment are uncovered and magnified in the
“desperate attention” of the second state: “I had to admit it: from birth, I had spent most of my life orienting
myself . . . taking bearings, second by second.” The amount of time and energy spent in attempted
reorientations is phenomenal, and fatiguing. The moments of exhaustion can be profound. (162) —J. Fortuna

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falling asleep, but sure enough, we will wake up into a dream world, and there we are again. For
the most part, there are usually arms, legs, a full torso, and we are relating to other beings, more
or less in the same kind of structure. We reorient pretty quickly. It is an illusory body, which we
only know when we wake up, and there are illusory others with bodies—which, again, we only
know when we wake up. And then the dream comes to an end and the same thing happens. The
dream body dissolves, the dream others dissolve. We seem to go into a blank state again. We wake
up in our bed, and there we are again. We have a very strong perpetual habit of reorienting or
reembodying ourselves. We have a very strong memory of doing that; we do not let go of it. And
sometimes we think it saves our life from all kinds of oblivion. Perhaps it does, but nevertheless,
there is this world that does not exist in our own mind. As you might expect, the process of dying
has some similarities. It is certainly speculated as such.
The major teaching of another description of mind and consciousness that occurs in a later
tradition among Buddhist practitioners is what is described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead—a further
elaboration of the notion of consciousness. A further elaboration of the notion of illusion and
dream, within dream, within dream. In the end, The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s final instructions are
that if one truly appreciates the nature of this kind of illusion and illusion formation, one is capable
of recognizing it as such and relaxing with that. One can recognize that all appearances in the
dream, and all appearances right now, are products of the evolution of the eight states of
consciousness with the same sense of certainty that we have during a dream, with only slightly
altered conditions being more intact with our sensory world. The point is not to become terribly
frightened by this, but to recognize all appearance as the play of the mind and to relax with that.
As you have seen, the Marquis demonstrated that he was capable of relaxing within a dream,
within the most tumultuous night dream. He recognized it as a dream and rested with that. He
changed it the best he could with the equipment that he had to make it come out as favorably as
he might. Just as we ended the last section, we are once again talking about the nature of resting.
How to rest while going to sleep and, now, how to rest while being supposedly awake. You might
think about that.

Dream Practices
I did think of some more practices that you might try later. One of them is a slight extension of
what I mentioned before: tracking idea into image. In the process of being in bed and going to

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sleep, have somebody read to you. If you are so fortunate to be able to have that happen, you
might try this experiment. I think a number of people know what I am referring to. Something is
being read, you are falling asleep, you are hearing the words, and you are transforming them on
the spot into dream imagery, progressively. That is always an interesting situation.
The other practice that you might attempt, and this might be a little bit simpler, though you
have to be somewhat quick, is this: the moment of waking up, do not make a move. Just see what
is there. I am talking about before you become filled like a vacuum with thoughts. Before you say,
“It’s six o’clock or eight o’clock or nine o’clock and I have to be somewhere and I’m still in bed,
and this is my bed and my room and my walls, and my, my, my, my, my.” Before you get into that
activity like a six-year-old child—my toy, my food—before you get into that, see what happens. If
you can. If you are quick enough. You could get quicker as you practice.

Student: You have pinpointed pretty well what wakefulness and what dreaming and what mind
are, but could you pinpoint what is “the blackout,” or what is sleep?
Ed: “What is sleep” in terms of what happens . . . where?
S: What is the actual blackout? What’s going on when that happens?
Ed: Well, you should look at that more. Look directly into that blackout. That is important, but
it is pretty hard to do in sleep because you have about one chance a day, right? Unless you are
taking naps or something, which is not advisable at your age. But there are other opportunities to
do that and that is during meditation practice. A blackout is happening a lot, so that is sort of a
made-to-order experimental possibility.
S: You mean, the blackout of when you go to sleep is basically the same as the blackout from
when you are wakeful or mindful and then you go off on a daydream?
Ed: Yes.
S: That is the same thing?
Ed: Yes.
S: Okay. Thank you.

Student: Your quote from Ösel Tendzin, the second part of it, where you said, “There is a mind
that does not exist in your own mind.”
Ed: Ah, there is a “world” . . .

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 S: That was the first. After that you said, “There is a mind that does not exist in your own
mind.”
Ed: Which is your own mind.
S: Oh, okay. That seems to be saying that nothing is creating something out of nothing, or the
illusion of something.
Ed: Illusions are being created out of something.
S: What is that something?
Ed: Other, smaller building blocks of illusion.
S: Very simply, an onion of illusion working down to nothing?
Ed: Well, there is illusion and you know that you are not saying right now, “This is an illusion.”
You are asking me a question—you mean it, the question. Are you saying that is an illusion?
S: No. I am saying that there is the implication that from a different vantage point, this is an
illusion.
Ed: Right, right. But you do not have the different vantage point at this moment, so it is all talk
that we say this is illusion. It might be something else if we were convinced in the marrow of our
bones that this were an illusion—we might be talking differently.
S: We probably would not be talking.
Ed: Maybe not. Yes.
S: The way I distinguish between the waking illusion and the dreaming one is that physical
reality can usually be predicted to act in certain ways most of the time, so on that basis . . .
Ed: In active waking and not in the dream?
S: No. What is perceived as physical reality while dreaming does not act the same way that
what we assume to be physical reality does while we are awake.
Ed: Occasionally.
S: On that basis, could mind be said to exist as a set of physiological or electro-chemical
reactions to this predictable, physical reality?
Ed: Do predictable, electro-chemical, and physiological reactions exist as much during the
dream (night dream) state, as they do during acting waking state? They are indistinguishable. An
orgasm in the night is indistinguishable from an orgasm during waking day, along with the blood
pressure, changes of all kinds. Depending on the scenario that is presented, it turns out that when
you look at the physio-chemical events, there is not a differentiating tool.

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 Student: Toward the end of the last section you mentioned an indestructible consciousness that
is extremely wakeful and notes events. You said it was a “clinical question” or a “clinical issue”
that such attention could be encouraged and cultivated and that it would have clinical application
or effects. Which consciousness were you speaking of? One of the eight?
Ed: The eighth.
S: Is that the one that is refined, so to speak?
Ed: Yes. That is, it cannot be disturbed. It can be whipped up, but it cannot be obliterated or
obscured. Not even in birth or death. That is what they say.
S: And of all the eight, it would have the least allegiance to self-justification, for instance?
Ed: Yes, that is true. I slightly over simplified the situation because there is something beyond
the eighth consciousness; there is a background to the whole thing, which is sometimes identified
as the essence of space. But that complicates it. It is enough to work with just the first, front eight.
S: Sounds like football. Thank you.

Student: Is the awareness that we are dreaming itself a dream?

Ed: The consciousness?
S: Yes, right, or we are in a dream and there is this thought . . .
Ed: Yes. As I said before, consciousness has the characteristics of perceiving and discriminating.
So, in the sense that it discriminates between feeling states, colors, forms, between dream and non-
dream, it has a quality of consciousness. But the actual mechanics of that particular consciousness
is itself working on dream mechanics built up out of the substance of dream. It is subtler, not as
gross or coarse, as a dream, but nevertheless in the same situation as the eight states.
S: Thank you.
Ed: That was a trick question, though, wasn’t it?
S: Yes, yes.

Student: This feels like something that I should know the answer to, but I think I have forgotten,
so I am going to ask. With the recognition that reality is somehow equal to a dream state, what is
it that keeps us from becoming apathetic? Or disinterested?
Ed: Well, it does not always happen. I think we will talk more about that in the next session,
actually. That will be somewhat of a theme: it doesn’t always happen.

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 Student: I would like to hear how traditions other than Buddhist and Hindu traditions compare
with the Yogachara findings.
Ed: What traditions?
S: Native American, or Polynesian, or anybody else. I am tired of Buddhists.
Ed: There is a dream tradition in every corner of the planet. Anthropologists know that no
matter where they go on Earth, there will be another dream tradition. From the jungles of Brazil,
to Africa, to the dream people of Australia, to the Sinoway or Maori of New Zealand, to indigenous
groups in Siberia—no matter where you go, wherever there are people, wherever there is a
definitive culture formed, there is a dream theory, dream model, states of consciousness of some
kind, whatever they call them. There is no way to know all of them.
S: As I recall, most of these other cultures are well-versed in not mistaking one reality for
another, saying, “This is the way it should be” or, “This is the way it is,” or, “This was just a
dream.” It seems like they incorporate both waking and sleeping into one big reality.
Ed: They are all different in that regard. I do not know about the Native American tribes Crow
and Cherokee, but I do know that the Sioux and the Hopi are similar and would understand the
eight states of consciousness pretty well.

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59
 III.
Psychopathology

I t is the winding down of our dream chapter, chapter of dreams, dream chapter of dreams. Let
us discuss some of the issues that have been arising and evolving. I do not think we can clear
up all of the questions that have come up, but perhaps clarifying some of them would be sufficient.
There is a question about “what does unconscious mean?” There are a lot of different definitions
of unconsciousness. But what we described in the last section—in terms of the eight states of
consciousness—all of that is unconsciousness. The eighth consciousness (or storehouse
consciousness) on the other hand, is frequently considered more synonymous with the term
unconscious than anything else. It is often thought of as the unconscious, which determines all
conscious experience. If anything fits with that, it would be the storehouse consciousness. But there
are many different kinds of unconsciousness and there are some people who think that the eighth
dimension in Buckaroo Banzai is the eighth consciousness.10 You should see that film.

Confusion Between Real and Unreal

The issue that we seem to be stuck with is: if reality as we construe it has so many steps to it (so
many evolving issues) and if the construction of reality (the development of what we call reality) is
really so similar in the active, waking state and in the dream state—whether it be a completely
confused dream or a waking, lucid dream—then what is real and what is unreal? That question in
itself seems to be ego’s question. No one asks that question except for this phenomenon that we
call ego. No one cares about that, otherwise. Ego cares about that because ego needs a reference
point. Ego needs an object out there, a justification out there, in order to define itself. So ego’s
dilemma asks, “What is real and what is not real?”
In fact, this seems to be the dilemma of every conceivable kind of psychopathology: what is real
and what is unreal. That dilemma, and the confusion created in that dilemma, gives rise to
innumerable kinds of states of consciousness. That dilemma, that question, is itself a state of mind
that is the underlying basis of dream formation. Confusion about the question—what is real and
what is unreal—is continually going on throughout the dream. It is often the experience of the

10. Ed is referring to the 1984 adventure film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. —J. Fortuna

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dream itself. It has been said that the very moment of a scene changing in a dream, the stage setting
so to speak, occurs when the question of “what is real and what is unreal” reaches some kind of
peak. With the changing phenomena in the experience in the dream, the question arises, “Who
am I, who am I really?” There is an acute sense of unreality in the dream, even though we do not
articulate that kind of question in the dream, the dream translates the question into imagery that
expresses the question. The scenario of the dream makes its shift. When we deliberate on these
questions—the construction of reality, our experiences of the difficulty of delineating reality in the
dream—and translate them into our waking life, we feel ego’s confusion because ego demands
some kind of answer, some kind of resting place.
That is the point that apathy, depression, or nihilism make their appearance. If this is very
acute, the dream may begin to progress into a nightmare. There is a sense of panic and fear. A
nightmare does not occur without those antecedent steps, nor does our living, waking nightmare
occur without those steps. In a sense, any conceivable psychopathology that we can think of is
prefaced with this sense of apathy, nihilism, and depression making their appearance. What we are
talking about now is the transition, the swing point, between dreaming and the appearance of
neurosis and psychosis in waking life. The same confusion seems to be evident.
I strongly recommend everyone read the entirety of William James’ The Varieties of Religious
Experiences (1902). This particular passage is a highlight, or a pinpoint, of this experience of
confusion about what is real and what is unreal and the after effects of it. It is said by James’
biographers that although James reports this as one of his case studies, that in fact, this was
something from his own journals about his own life.

While in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my
prospects, I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article
that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came
out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my
mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum. A black haired
youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or
rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin and the course
gray undershirt which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure.
He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing
but his black eyes and looking absolutely nonhuman. This image and my fear entered into

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 a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt potentially. Nothing that
I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck
for him. There was such a horror of him and such a perception of my own merely
momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my
breast gave way entirely and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was
changed for me altogether. I awoke one morning, morning after morning, with a horrible
dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew
before and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation. And although the immediate
feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of
others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark
alone. In general, I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could
live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface
of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in
her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb
by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always thought that this experience of
melancholia of mine had a religious bearing. (157–158)

That seems to be a very accurate summary of the kind of depression, melancholia he calls it, that
arises from the acute and seemingly overbearing experience of this unreality or confusion of reality
that we have been talking about.
The issue becomes more pinpointed and more exaggerated for people whose lives are already
in some difficulty. The experience of unreality and confusion between what is real and what is not
real and the dilemma in that leads to a sense of no meaning. The no meaning appears to be filled
in by a kind of meaning that rushes to fill it—a kind of meaning that is basically bad. From that
intolerable situation occurs a kind of switch-out and the switch-out is the attempt to gain some kind
of self-confidence. An exaggeration of that, and an end result of that, is the sense of psychotic
mania. The fully blown, exaggerated state of switching out11 of the feeling of basic badness is

11. Switching out is a term created by Ed in chapter three of Recovering Sanity (2003). The switch out occurs in the
middle phase of a “psychotic predicament.” The first phase is the force of ripening circumstance (karma)
confronting the rigid character of the person, causing an explosive reaction. The middle phase is one of
unspeakable humiliation and groundlessness, called the tear down of the power failure of I AM. This is a choice point.
The person could switch out from the explosive collapse of fixed identity into a higher, seemingly spiritual
dimension of concern and activity. Entering this new domain is the third phase of the predicament, a manic realm

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psychotic mania and everything that is a lesser version of that. Panic, fear, and nightmare rush to
fill in the gap of unreality. Therefore people who are doing psychological work with others, or who
have any intention of working with other people in these states of mind, have to deal with the issue
of self-confidence. This is a problem: Everyone who is facing this dilemma is trying to rouse self-
confidence in themselves. Unfortunately, it is a losing battle. There are many variations to this
thing called self-confidence. The problem is this self-confidence. It is a mistake to attempt to rouse
self-confidence on the basis of aggrandizing one’s self. It is endless struggle. It leads eventually into
a nightmare.
It is worthwhile to look at what confidence is. Whatever it is, it does not have the self as its
qualifier. It is purely confident without self-justification, without ownership of its experience. The
minute one takes ownership of it, as we have seen within the dream experience itself, the dream
turns against one. You could say that confidence is having confidence in the experience of
consciousness. The primary characteristic of consciousness that we have talked about is that it
manifests—consciousness manifests itself by functions of perceiving and discriminating. That is the
only way it is apparent.

Rousing the Intention to Wake Up

If we go back to the experience of lucid dreaming and the practices and disciplines developed by
the Marquis, the thing that he spoke most about and roused himself most for in his experiments
was the intention to wake up. He continually came back to that sensation: how to wake up in the
midst of dream. It was something he had to practice over, and over, and over again. In terms of
eight states of consciousness that we talked about before, it is as if the practice of the intention to
wake up during the dream has to be seeded and re-seeded, over and over again, in the eighth
consciousness, in the repository, in the storehouse, so that it can be drawn upon. Then the mere
memory of the intention to wake up, or the mere conditioning glimpse of it, would rouse it to its
full aspect of waking up. We know that the seed of it is there; the wiring, the electronics, of the
whole thing is already built in, but it has to be further seeded and cultivated. This was the practice

that is vaster and endlessly more fascinating than ordinary circumstances. Ed called this entire process psychotic
transformation.
Ed privately suggested to me that the dream can be seen as a series of predicaments that one is compelled to
work with, resolve, or switch out from. The core dream dilemma is then one of “self-justification” based on the
futility of being able to stabilize a solid and secure sense of self, which keeps falling apart. The dream is seen as a
continuing crisis of self-justification. —J. Fortuna

63
that the Marquis performed in his dream life that made waking up more available to him. The
practice was only an intermediary stage because he could not rouse the practice of it during the
dream without first rousing and escalating the intention to do so before the dream. As we have talked
about, if one looks closely at the phenomena of the passage of thinking into imagining and into
dreaming, that it is a continuous, unbroken line. In the same way, rousing the intention to be alert
while going to sleep makes it more possible to rouse that intention during the dream. That is the
way we train ourselves to wake up under any conditions.
In terms of meditation practice, we approach the situation, the meditation seat, with a sense of
intention. We may not spell it out in the same terms that the Marquis did, but generally speaking,
we have an intention to practice wakefulness, which carries over even into our daydreams during
the meditation practice. That we can count on that. The reason why we do meditation practice,
in terms of being psychologists or in terms of aspiring to help others, is that we need to practice
waking up from dreams and from daydreams. To the extent that we do that, we can recognize the
phenomenon of dreams, daydreaming, and mindlessness of all kinds in other people. Just as one
practices waking up into a lucid dream, one has to recognize contrast within the dream—this is
dreaming and this is not dreaming. So it is also in waking life when working with people. We have to
practice the recognition of what is wakeful and what is mere wandering, distracted mind—which
will eventually wind up into panic, fear, and nightmare. When we do this, other kinds of possibilities
arise. We are talking in general about how to interrupt a fixed mind. The “fixed mind” of a night
dream seems to have its own life, its own cycle of development, its own progression. The mind is
“fixed” in terms of trying to justify ourselves to ourselves.

Structures of Dream Formation

I know there is some question of whether this is a completely valid notion of dreams—whether the
issue of protecting oneself, defining oneself, stabilizing oneself, righting oneself, aligning oneself,
and even aggrandizing oneself, is a valid explanation of the scenario that develops in a dream. On
this point, I will refer you to another source that we have not had time to talk about: the second
chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), which is called “The Analysis of a Specimen Dream.”
In it, Freud reports one of his own dreams during the time when he was a young therapist, early
in the business of working with people. He reports a dream that is almost archetypical for young
therapists.

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 It is a dream of self-justification. It is a dream that says, “The patient did not improve, not
because I did anything wrong, but because other intercurrent events interfered with my treatment
and made the outcome less favorable then I, or the patient, would have wished for.” In this
specimen dream, there is layer, upon layer, upon layer of self-justification. That does not mean
that every dream is purely based on the nature of self-justification, but a great deal of the scenario,
the drama, of the dream, is directed by that director. It is not necessarily obvious from the story of
the dream itself. Although sometimes it is patently obvious, but it requires a depth of exploration
that is not easy to do and, on the other hand, is not difficult to do. It takes a particular form of
exertion, this practice that one brings to the manifest content of the dream itself. It is clearly spelled
out in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and many people might know it as the associative technique. It
is worth trying, at least a few times. I find that people these days do not have the energy to do it.
They want to look at the dream right away and say, “This means that, that means this.” They want
to get it over with. But not even our waking experience has that kind of coherence, that kind of
straight, logical formation. Every event that happens in our waking life is a mixture and
conglomeration of sensory perceptions, mixed with mind expectation, mixed with delusionary
conviction of what happens. We cannot even walk down the street without that happening, so why
do we assume that the manifest content of the dream is any different?
It is, in fact, much more extreme than that. If one wants to penetrate the dream phenomena
at all, it will take a little bit of effort and a little bit of time. One should not be satisfied with the
manifest content of the dream any more than one is satisfied with the manifest content of this
seminar. That is: I sat in a seminar, I listened to a talk, I went to a discussion group, I went to
lunch, I listened to a talk. That does not describe a seminar any more than your dream content
describes what was going on in your mind during the time of the dream. So, the dream discipline
of dissecting, or as Freud called it, analyzing dreams, has some purpose. It picks apart our
experience and shows us how our experience is made of a jigsaw puzzle of experiences, perceptions,
and expectations. It highlights how our ordinary, waking life is manufactured exactly the same
way. The same eight consciousnesses that are revolving, recycling, moment to moment, in our
dreams are occurring in our waking life—only the conditions are different.12

12. Traditional dream psychology makes the distinction between manifest content and latent content of the dream.
The manifesting dramatic experience of the dream habitually compels and demands the full engagement of our
conscious awareness. We lock on to the apparent intensity of the dream with full conviction in its reality, as if our
life depended on how we react. So much so that there is precious little of our awareness left free to doubt, to
wonder, “Am I dreaming now?” The latent content is what is going on in one’s mind during the dream’s

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Confidence to Enter Another’s World
The idea of practicing meditation (and I don’t mean to try to sell this to anybody, but it is impossible
to practice contemplative psychotherapy without a thorough grounding in this discipline) is that it
is a discipline that sharpens every state of consciousness. If consciousness is manifested by
perception and discrimination, it is the meditation practice that hones that perception and
discrimination, making the eight states of consciousness much more apparent. Sharpening the
states of consciousness, or evolving the states of consciousness, is the tool or mechanism that allows
us to wake up—whether it be from daydream or nightdream. Meditation allows you to perform
the practice we suggested yesterday: noticing the first, immediate thought, or noticing even before
that thought that occurs on waking in the morning or evening. That precision is what is sharpened
by meditation practice and that is confidence. Confidence is that which allows one to wake up. If
you had confidence in your ability to discriminate a dream from a non-dream, you would never
be afraid of a nightmare. That confidence is not necessarily one’s own, nor can one take any
particular pride in it, but practice does allow one to more freely enter other people’s fixed minds
and other people’s obsessions.
And what do we do then? The good news is that we can then at least have the capabilities of
exercising our inherent urges to help other people. Never has that urge been seen in the human
condition to be absent. It is obstructed, clouded, deluded, and made into megalomaniac delusions
of messianic conviction—but nevertheless, its seed, basic urge is always there. What to do about
this? We are suggesting that the practice of meditation, which clarifies and sharpens the variety of
states of consciousnesses that we live with, gives us the confidence to enter another person’s world
and help them with their bad dream. We have the confidence to protect them from mismanaging
their projections, to offer protection, to offer advice, to offer practices. That is the basis of this
incredible dream machine. We can make it work, if we put some effort into it. Recognizing the
enormous effort that was required by the Marquis to practice his lucid dreaming, we could at least
put a little bit of effort into lucid waking.
There is one other, final issue that William James has exposed more than anyone else in the
Western psychological tradition. If we call the issue of waking up a seed theory, a seed that is there
that we practice with and that is then planted and cultivated further back into the eighth state of

formation. Exploring the latent content could reveal the dream’s underlying meaning, relevance, or significance,
and the dynamic processes of dream formation. Bringing awareness to dream meaning and formation process
opens the possibility for a genuine dream awareness practice to develop. —J. Fortuna

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consciousness, then there is also a germ theory. When we examine our process of falling asleep, we
see the germ of how we ignore things, how we cover things up, and how we blackout. The germ of
blacking out is the germ of every psychopathology. It was James’ conviction that there is no
psychopathology that has ever been cataloged and encyclopedia-ized that we do not all have within
us. Attending to and acknowledging that is a major step toward entering another person’s
pathology. There is then a great deal less separation, seeing oneself as healthy and the other as
unbearably confused. There is no pathology that we cannot understand on the basis of our own
experience. If we practice the discrimination of waking up and the discrimination of the stages of
falling asleep, we will see every variety of pathology within our own lives—at least the germ and
potentiality of all pathologies. Because of that, we are not foreigners in anyone else’s bizarre world.
There is no bizarreness that is not already ongoing within us. The only issue is the issue of the
confidence to acknowledge that, work with that, and extend our own kindness to other people.
What is that kindness? That kindness is what we have touched on in the dream discussion
groups during this seminar. That kindness is that very moment of openness, sensitivity, and fragility
that we have when we listen to another person’s dream. We can expand and cultivate that further.
The practice of listening to dreams, even one’s own, without preconception, without trying to make
anything out of it, without trying to interpret it on the spot, without leaping to conclusions about
the manifest content—that itself is a kind of kindness. Such kindness seems to be the precondition
of working with anybody at all.
We have gone from discussing lucid dreaming, to lucid waking, to the issue of psychopathology,
to how psychopathology comes from the confusion between lucid dreaming and lucid waking, and
to how we might at least approach that confusion in other people.

Student: I was recently introduced to some information and writings about a woman whose
name I am not sure of—Marie von Franz?—who worked very closely with Jung for many years.
Ed: Marie-Louise von Franz, yes.
S: She said that in every dream is incapsulated somebody’s life issue, or the life issue can be
found in there somewhere. I was curious to know how you compared that with your idea of dreams
being progressive, or the information coming progressively.
Ed: There is no problem. I have never heard anybody say anything different than that.
S: Okay, so . . . you are not saying something else?
Ed: No. They all . . . you dream about what you think about. The Marquis demonstrated this.

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In a very simplistic way—think before you go to bed of house, think of house, and hold that
thought. If you are somewhat one-pointed in holding that thought, you will dream about a variety
of imaginations of house. It will be obvious, even in manifest content, if you hold it. We do not
often do that, but we do have all our own obsessions in which we are one-pointed and they turn up
in our dreams, just as they turn up in our lives. They are transfigured, transformed, disguised,
distorted, but nevertheless, they are the same issue. But we do not have to go to dreams for that.
We are what we are at any one moment in time, including all our dreams, all our means of
dreaming, and all our history of dreaming, at any one point. We are a living dream. If you take
associations to this particular living dream, this particular manifest content, you would discover
the whole history of it from looking at any one moment.
S: Right. I am doing body-centered therapy and I can use almost any part in the body and still
get to the same issue as if I worked with somebody’s hand twitching, or if their leg was in constant
tension. I notice that I can get pretty much the same information from either avenue or from either
source.

Student: I haven’t read The Interpretation of Dreams. I wonder if you might briefly describe the
associative technique that you mentioned. I don’t know what that is at all.
Ed: How to do that . . . did you have a dream this weekend? Pick out of any dream that you
had, the most sensually vivid, intense moment of the dream. Pick one particular image.
S: Well, in one of the dreams, there was a little room that was basically . . . the walls were
covered with multi-colored tiles, extremely bright, very vivid and colorful.
Ed: Freud at that point might ask you to just let your mind run, without resistance, into multi-
colored tiles. Do it.
S: . . . Maitri.
Ed: Maitri what? Maitri rooms?
S: Yes.
Ed: So, you could keep going from that. It would be like that but you cannot hold back, that is
why it takes a bit of effort, you cannot hold back, you have to keep going. You might note the point
where you want to hold back, that is an interesting point too. That is basically it. You can do that
for each dream fragment image. It seems to develop an almost subterranean story behind the
manifest content in the dream. It is interesting. I do not know what it is worth, but it is interesting.

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It is interesting in terms of how the dream is put together and what turns that whole jigsaw puzzle
and makes it one piece. There is a lot going on underneath the storyline.

Student: Using this definition of dreaming that you have given us, how do dreams of precognition
fit into that self-serving mode?
Ed: This precognition thing has been haunting us the whole seminar. Obviously, there are
many different aspects of dreaming that we have not had time to deal with now. It is a vast issue
that has plagued this species since Paleolithic man. One talk is not going to cover it. Precognition
seems to be coming up all the time, though, and Paleolithic man in particular was very interested
in that since he had to be where the elk were moving the next season. Everything depended on the
prediction of the conditions and the movement of the animals upon which the tribal culture
depended. Dreams were a major attempt to predict and prepare for that. A great many lives
seemed to depend on the outcome of the prediction made in the dreams by people who were
specialized in that. The story of Joseph in the Bible, and the whole famine in Egypt, depended on
Joseph’s pronouncement on the Pharaoh’s dreams. It was a heavy issue. It does not have that kind
of intensity anymore because we talk about the playing and dabbling aspects of precognition. There
is also the importance of the issue of changes—it is different in different cultures. What Joseph and
the Bible depended on was how he could read the past; how past conditions would lead to future
developments. Joseph called the Pharaoh’s dream precognitive—that one could understand the
dream as dictating what future events would be and therefore what steps should be taken now in
order to meet those future events. Joseph was reading the Pharaoh’s dream in terms of the
Pharaoh’s intentions. The cycle of events that caused a particular dream to occur and the
movement of the eight states of consciousness (although I do not think that Joseph thought in those
terms) and the movements and the intentions that created the dream, would be the same intentions
of how the Pharaoh ruled in the future, whether the Pharaoh knew it or not. The same habitual
patterns of illusion-formation that created the dream, would be, in effect, in the Pharaoh’s mind
and the Pharaoh’s kingdom, and Joseph saw through that. Do you follow me?
S: Yes, in that example. I don’t know if I could generalize that to other examples of
precognition.
Ed: There are many other kinds of precognition. When I sit on stage and look in the glare of
this light, I sometimes see peoples’ faces, people whom I do not know, and I see them somewhat
indistinct. A month from now, I see you in the street, and I say, “I’ve seen that person in my dream,

69
my dream foretold that I would see you.” That’s obviously a simple level, but there are many things
that we call precognition.
S: The kind of examples I was thinking of were dreams of an event that will come to pass, like
harm to someone. I think that is an experience that other people have had. It eventually comes
true and there is no way that one can trace how that information could have come to you or how
you could have sensed any past seeds or potentiality, as you discussed in the Pharaoh’s dream. You
would not have any access to that kind of . . .
Ed: Once again you are staying on the surface of things with manifest content. Actually look at
what the directorial elements were, so to speak. The director of the dream is setting up the stage of
the dream, using all the furniture from the storehouse of the prop room. If we look into that in
terms of what we just talked about, the associative dissection of the dream, the precognitive dreams
change their shape. What explains how the manifest content of the dream was an exact scenario
of what took place in reality, that is hard to say, except one begins to distrust the memory of the
dream a little bit. Sometimes the memory of the dream is distorted by the present events. It is not
that easy to find precognitive dreams that are written down at the moment of awakening. The
detail of that written-down dream is not as precognitive as the dreams that are remembered later
on.
S: So, you think the coincidence is manufactured in hindsight?
Ed: Memory. Yes. On the other hand, at the turn of the century, a good friend of William
James, a parapsychologist in England by the name of Myers,13 wrote a book on precognitive
dreams, which are inexplicable. So . . .
S: One of the reasons I bring this up is because of this notion that waking and dreaming are
illusory, are somehow contained within the self, and that the self creates this illusion—this is how
I have understood these talks so far. If there is something to precognitive dreams, it challenges the
notion of us being self-contained. I’d be the last one to believe in that, except here I am asking that
question.
Ed: Well, there it is. You were the last one to dream it and here you are doing it.
S: The notion that consciousness is not self-contained.
Ed: Yes, there are a lot of outflows of that. You are doing something you would never have

13. Frederic W. H. Myers (February 6, 1843–January 17, 1901) was a poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of
the Society for Psychical Research. See “Frederic Myers’s Service to Psychology” by William James in The
Popular Science Monthly, August 1901, 380–89. —J. Fortuna

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dreamed of, but you would not have done it unless you dreamed of it, thought of it, planned it—
however spontaneous it seems to be at the moment.
S: I do not have trouble acknowledging that there is part of me that would like to believe in
some form of collective consciousness, which I think is precognitive—not collective
consciousness—but some permeability of boundary of self, some access of knowledge to others,
unless, let me backtrack just one step . . .
Ed: Oh, I see . . .
S: You see, the way I understood the talk was that the illusoriness of our existence, in both
waking and dreaming, the self-serving-ness of it, somehow, not only did it mean that we do not
have access to some objective reality, but that there is not access to one another’s illusory—I’m
sorry if I'm being too convoluted—that we do not have true access to one another’s illusions.
Maybe there is no logic to that conclusion, but that is how I heard it.
Ed: Well, I don’t know what to do with that. I assume that there is a lot of overlap between our
mutual illusions. We are sitting in the same room together, giving rise to illusions. I assume there
is some individuality in our illusions.
S: It’s a hard thing to . . . to know.
Ed: Well, don’t fret about it. I mean—it is alright. You do not have to figure out the ultimate
reality. You could drive yourself nuts if you try. You could clarify what you mean by words, that
would help you think about it further. In the same way if you practice remembering your dreams,
like writing them down as soon as possible, you will clarify your memory of dreams and that will
give you some real material to work with, because the memory of the dream is changing moment
by moment, as soon as you start waking up. We could clarify the illusions before we even talk about
them.

Student: In contrast to what I think you are saying, it seems that our dreams are often about
precisely what we are not thinking about. For example, my own experience is that I can be, in my
waking life, involved in a tremendous amount of dreaming. I’m off in my own dream world, and
then I can have a dream in my sleeping life that in effect snaps me out of my waking dream and
presents reality to me in a way that I had not been thinking about it in waking life.
Edward: Another way to say that would be that the dreams are the mirror images of your mind.
S: Can you clarify how you are using mirror images?
Ed: That the image is projected out, turned around, and coming back at you.

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 S: The flip side? Right.
Ed: You call that real, right? So, it could be that the effort of not thinking about things is what
could come back in the form of aggression objectifications of ignoring.
S: It would always be some kind of effort then, that comes back in a dream. It could be thinking
or not thinking—is that what you are saying?
Ed: The effort toward thinking, yes, is always represented. The effort toward denying and
ignoring is always represented, too, in the force of the emotional coloring of the representations.

Student: Intention seems to be the most important tool you discussed. If intention is the ticket
that allows one to traverse these eight realms, or especially the sixth, seventh, and eighth levels of
consciousness, which you discussed . . .
Ed: Your intention is buying the ticket.
S: One has to maintain the intention to buy the ticket in order to get anywhere. So how does
that intention relate to the sixth, or seventh, or eighth levels of consciousness? How is it that
intention can go from waking to dreaming and always be present?
Ed: If one repeatedly arouses the intention, that becomes part of the memory traces, seeds,
germs; that becomes part of the repository, part of our storehouse, part of our equipment. And any
future intention will arouse the memory of the previous intentions and be strengthened thereby.
S: My question was coming from the place of thinking about intention. It reminded me about
strong abusive patterns of behavior, like with an alcoholic, for example. How much alcohol
literature talks about the intention. One has the experience of having a particular intention, the
strongest intention that one can imagine, not to have another drink, to stop a particular behavior.
Nonetheless, it seems that one has stepped from some kind of boundary between wakefulness and
another state of mind and the intention becomes lost. I was interested in the parallels between
intention in connection with such addictive or compulsive behaviors and the intention that one
can learn to carry in a dream. You simply seem to be saying that practice is the heart of intention
under that circumstance also.
Ed: That is a much more complicated issue. You could have an intention to be healthy, but
somehow that is not going to do it. It has to be broken down into much smaller steps than that, to
be healthy in terms of the food you eat, the rest you have, the environment you are in. It is too
global otherwise. But if you have particular intentions, when you practice them, they will
strengthen on the basis of becoming part of the storehouse.

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 Student: I was hoping that you might comment on a curious aspect of Traditional Chinese
Medicine. They describe the condition of unhealthiness calling it simply dreaming. The assumption
is that if a person is quite healthy, they will have no recollection of their dreams when they wake
up in the morning from sleep. Dreaming is specifically seen as a disorder of the heart.
Ed: To remember dreams?
S: To actually have dreams and to recollect or have awareness of dreams. It is kind of a curious
thing, because in the West, we talk about dreams a lot.
Ed: It is not just the West, obviously.
S: Someone was telling me that Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche has no dreams.
Ed: That is not true.
S: And do you think, then, that if dreaming is in some sense an illusory condition, that if one is
quite healthy, one might not have any dreams at all? Or, why cultivate illusory mind?
Ed: I cannot understand how otherwise sophisticated Chinese medicine ever came up with such
an idea. Dreaming seems to be an unstoppable phenomenon—as long as we are alive, as long as
the eight states of consciousness are ripping off that illusion formation, whether it happens in the
day or it happens in the night. Dreaming is unstoppable except under extreme conditions, which
we mentioned in the last session, like total stupefaction from neurological coma. Otherwise, they
seem to be unstoppable. There are many dreams that I have read about in Chinese literature, but
maybe they were all unhealthy writers.
S: So then, you think it is quite healthy to cultivate this illusory condition? That is a prerequisite
to being non-illusory?
Ed: Say that once more please.
S: I am wondering if you are saying that if one can cultivate the illusory state of dreaming, that
this is a necessary . . .
Ed: Stop there for a moment. You do not have to cultivate it, it is happening. You could
cultivate your ability to remember dreams. Remember and record them the next morning, for
example. That is cultivatable.
S: Right. This cultivation of one’s awareness of dreaming is a prerequisite to cultivating a non-
illusory state.
Ed: No, not necessarily. We cultivate that in order to study the material that is churned up
during the illusory conditions of the eight states of consciousness at night. Then we have material

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to take a look at to see how that differs from the illusions and formations that occur during our
wakeful time, and active wakeful time. We compare them and learn something about illusion
formation in general. It seems to be an interesting and sometimes worthwhile study to do this. But,
in either case, it does not lead to ill health or health.
I would like to read a poem Jeffrey Fortuna just wrote. The background of this poem is
Paleolithic times. The title of the poem is “Dreaming Under Extreme Conditions.”

One million years ago, we slogged around in the dark swamps of the primeval jungle.
Under the hot sun, the mud caked and dried on our amour skin. At night, we listened to
the groans of our neighbors eating or being eaten in this thick goo of ignorance. We
dreamed of standing up on solid land with our heads high.

Later on, this happened and we could see for very long distances.

One thousand years ago, we witnessed the burning of gentle people, who had the wrong
dreams. The well-meaning prayers of the high priests of the Inquisition blended awkwardly
with the clunk of the gallows. At night, we dared to dream of going beyond fear and
mediocrity. But upon waking, we just went about our business.

Later on, we accomplished this and we could see into ourselves.

Last night, having heard the instructions of how to look into our minds, we dreamt we
could see the self-luminous Alaya consciousness. We felt the sights and sounds of our
thoughts, feeding in the jungle of our imagination. But we felt sympathy for a very confused
world.

Later on, we felt youthful and quite rested.

At this very moment, we realized we have been dreaming for a very long time.
Accomplishments have been hard won, yet we feel happy and pleased. What more could
we dream of?

Being the spokesperson for crocodiles and gentle people going about their business, I
request that we dream of expanding social harmony. The spark of wakefulness uncovered
by this dream seminar community could easily explode into the richest of imagery of world
peace beyond our wildest dreams.

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75
Styles of Counter-Transference

76
77
 Introduction to “Styles of Counter-Transference”
Jeffrey Fortuna

Original promotional flyer for the seminar

I would like to welcome you to this second seminar given by Ed, titled “Styles of
Countertransference.” In 1986, at the time of this seminar, Dr. Podvoll and a small group of
us were in the mature phase of our first Windhorse therapeutic community, Maitri Psychological
Services, in Boulder, Colorado. This community was to disband a year later when its life cycle
completed. Little did we know that the Windhorse Project would re-emerge three years later and
develop into the vibrant international community it is today. At the time of this seminar, Ed was
teaching a year-long training in intensive psychotherapy with four senior Windhorse team leaders.
This particular Naropa seminar on counter-transference is a cogent distillation of what Dr. Podvoll
was actively discovering and teaching in that intensive psychotherapy training. The Legacy Project
is currently editing and synthesizing the transcripts of that training for future publication.
In this text, I have decided to use Sigmund Freud’s hyphenated spelling of counter-transference
when he first introduced the term in “The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1961):

We have begun to consider the “counter-transference,” which arises in the physician as a

result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings, and have nearly come to the

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 point of requiring the physician to overcome this counter-transference in himself. (144–
145)iv

It is interesting to note that Dr. Freud created several such counter- terms: counter-affects,
counter-cathexis, counter-volition, counter-will, and counter-wish dreams. Donald Winnicott,
another of Ed’s historical mentors, retained the hyphenated spelling of counter-transference as
described in footnote 16 in Session I of this seminar. In modern conventional language, this phrase
has condensed into one complex word with twelve consonants and seven vowels congealing into
five syllables; a word as complicated as the concept itself. I feel that the hyphenated spelling makes
this long and unwieldy term easier to work with. The humble hy-phen is not much in itself. It links
words that otherwise drift apart yet separates them so they each retain their original meaning. Yet
it potently provides a bare gap, a pause, a slowing in the reading-stream. Neither merged nor
isolated, the words, like people, connect in relationship. The hyphen is analogous to an island of
clarity that may enable the participants in the therapy process to recognize what is happening
between them, rather than to blindly enact their drama of transference and its counter. Ed is asking
us to continue to take a fresh look at the experience of counter-transference. He is teaching us to
wake up out of the trance-like stupor of counter-transference re-enactments. I feel that using the
now-unconventional hyphenated form of this term can trigger just such a moment of reflective
awareness.
In this seminar, Ed builds on the core approach of brilliant sanity to explore the process of
counter-transference. He describes the stages and practices for integrating counter-transference
into the healing relationship as a path to realizing inherent wakefulness for both client and
therapist. Ed brings to this seminar his life-time of experience in the discipline of intensive,
psychoanalytic psychotherapy with people recovering from psychotic disorders. This is a highly
specialized line of psychotherapy that originated with Sigmund Freud and continued to be
developed by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles, Otto Will, and many others: a lineage
of therapy that Ed carried then taught to his students. Ed was a pioneer in joining this therapeutic
discipline with his extensive meditation experience and study of Buddhist psychology. By 1986,
this joining of the interpersonal discipline of psychotherapy with the personal discipline of working
with oneself through the practice of meditation came to be called “contemplative psychotherapy.”
Ed brings a whole new dimension to the discussion of counter-transference by introducing us to
the contemplative practice of tonglen, a Tibetan term literally meaning sending and taking. This

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practice, commonly called exchanging self for other, is an ancient training in compassion that builds on
the foundation of mindfulness-awareness meditation. In the Windhorse Project, we continue to
practice and teach this line of intensive psychotherapy, which is now deeply embedded in our
personal paths of meditation.
This “Styles of Countertransference” seminar was taught in 1986. Over the next four years,
Ed gradually completed his career as author, psychiatrist, and professor. In 1990, he became a
Buddhist monk and entered a twelve-year intensive meditation retreat in southern France. After
nine years in retreat, he re-examined this tradition of intensive psychotherapy from the perspective
of intensive meditation practice, and wrote his chapter, “Psychotherapy As an Expression of the
Spiritual Journey Based on the Experience of Shunyata.” Ed explained he wrote this when “the
Windhorse group asked me to write something to help train new psychotherapists. I decided to
share the wisdom of the special lineage in which I was trained and to give some basic instructions
that were becoming more clear to me when integrated with intensive Buddhist meditation”
(Recovering Sanity 2003, 319). This paper was published in the second edition of the original book
The Seduction of Madness (1990) retitled as Recovering Sanity: A Compassionate Approach to Understanding
and Treating Psychosis (2003), which appeared just a few months before his death. I strongly
recommend that the serious student of psychotherapy read Ed’s chapter, which is the culminating
statement of a master psychotherapist, teacher, scholar, and meditator. Here is the concluding
statement of this final chapter of both his book and his life—his last words on the subject:

In the very specialized form of therapy of working intimately with disturbed people, the
lineage of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles, and others attempted to explore the
capabilities for the human transmission of sanity to its full extent. Fundamental to all their
discoveries is the living principle that such unique human relationships are, from beginning
to end, a mutual discovery between therapist and patient: a mutual journey of becoming
free from personal madness. We have come full circle: at first the wonder and energy of
psychoanalysis passed into the discipline of psychotherapy; and now it returns, while
retaining its original inspiration, in the form of basic attendance [core Windhorse
therapeutic discipline]. In this way, the original intention and brilliance of intimate human
caring is capable of entering into the domains of child-care, education, the elderly, and the
dying, and gives all human service in general a more profound dimension (2003, 349).

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As I worked on this seminar transcript, I wondered about a parable. Since I knew Ed loved to teach
from parables as a method to bring clinical phenomena alive, who then is the parable? It dawned
on me that each of us is the parable. The living energy of our personal history of study and
experience as psychotherapists, and more generally as people of compassion, resonates with the
structure and application that Ed presents in this seminar. Clearly, we don’t just blindly swallow
what we are being shown. With respect we open to it, take it in, work it around in our matrix of
mind-body awareness, until we come to our own conclusions and make it our own. The parable-
of-oneself is a lonely path of developing an honest relationship with oneself since, in the end, only
we know how honest we are being with ourselves and others. As Chögyam Trunpa explains:

Making friends with ourselves is not very easy. It is a very profound thing. At the same time,
we could do it, we could make it. Nevertheless, making a long story too short, involvement
with ourselves means making an honest relationship with ourselves, looking into ourselves
as what we are and realizing that external comfort will be temporary, that our comforters
may not be there all the time. There is the possibility of us being alone. Therefore there is
more reason to work and go along with the practices that are involved. (Transcending Madness
1992, 168)

At the moment when we see our all-too-familiar habitual patterns being selectively activated by
particular people and situations, we can rouse the fearless intention to use every aspect of our mind
in the service of the therapeutic process. I invite you to tune your full resonant field of personal
experience into the learning environment of this seminar. Through the immediacy of “literary
exchange,” we can allow our understanding to be transformed by relationship with the living
quality of Ed and his seminar. In this way, the parable of our life will be deepened and enriched,
and our brave heart of compassion will grow in strength.

August 2020
Boulder, Colorado

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 I.
Passion and Intention in Psychotherapy

T he issue of counter-transference is murky, as anyone who has thought about this very
technical psychotherapeutic term can attest to. The literature is enormous and somewhat
unrevealing at the same time. So, the real issue is: relationships that presume to be healing. In a
sense, the term counter-transference, refers to any aspect of the emotional or mental processes that the
one who presumes to heal endures. We know from our own experience that any intimate
relationship is fraught with illusions, projections, expectations, and demands of every conceivable
kind. But more specifically, we will focus on those relationships we call therapeutic or healing. Or,
more subtly than that, any aspect of a relationship where one person feels that they are in position,
and have an intention, to be useful and healing to another.
So, the term counter-transference specifically refers to that process, that dynamic, that occurs in
the arena of intensive psychotherapy. That’s where it was discovered and described, and that’s
where the dialogue about this term—the meaning of it and the usefulness of it—takes place. On
the other hand, I would like you to keep in mind the possibility of understanding this term for a
variety of other kinds of human relationships, in fact, all human relationships. Though we will
specifically be talking about the paradigm or the adventure, so to speak, of intensive psychotherapy,
we should be aware that all of this has an application to all relationships. In a sense, that’s one of
the justifications for the study of intensive psychotherapy: it is a highlight, a magnification, of the
capability of human intimacy wherever it might appear. So, the issues might be very similar,
although exaggerated, caricatured in intensive psychotherapy.

Counter-transference Dilemmas: Too Close, Too Far

It is human-being relationships that seem to be capable of, and have tremendous potential for,
being healing relationships. In fact, the human realm, or the aspect of human-beingness, seems to
be marked particularly by the capacity of people to relate with each other in a useful way, in a way
where the relationship can actually bring the other out of dis-ease. It cannot be said in many of the
other realms, in many of the other kingdoms, in many of the other species—but we seem to be
particularly gifted, highly evolved, and developed in this possibility. It means that we believe, on
the one hand, that we as potential healers or therapists, enter another person’s life, but what we

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obviously find happening is that, in just such magnitude, the other person enters our life. There
are various ways we try to protect against that happening. There are various ways that therapists,
healers, and people in relationships of any kind would like to dampen that possibility. Nevertheless,
if one is aware of all of the contingencies of relationship, we realize that a client, patient, whatever,
whoever, has entered our lives as much as we have presumed to enter theirs. It is a given. It is a
fact of healing relationship.
The healing relationship that we’re referring to in terms of intensive psychotherapy is one of
quite a bit of intensity, depth, and the fullness of the complete gamut of human emotions. All of
that is the working base of the healing relationship. None of it can be left out. None of it can be
thought of as unnecessary or a burden to a professional using a technical procedure where another
person is actually helped or cured by one other person. So, the issue of counter-transference
involves the whole potentiality and the whole fullness of everything that has to be offered and
worked with in the human realm.
So, this seems to be what there is, and then the question is how to work with it. What has been
noticed over the past years, the most recent years of the history of intensive psychotherapy, is that
the therapist develops feelings, responses, and so-called complexes—all of which might be
interferences or helpful bases for the healing relationship. This has proven to be somewhat of a
dilemma. On the one hand, therapists of all kinds say that one must be very careful of the therapist-
patient relationship. I’ll use the word patient unless anybody minds terribly. The carefulness has to
be exerted because therapists often get very disturbed by their relationship with their clients,
patients. And there are warnings that have appeared periodically. Yes, that one should understand
the other; yes, that one should be able to identify with the pain of another. But at the same time,
one should be very careful about losing, the possibility of losing, one’s neutrality, one’s objectivity—
and therefore a certain kind of detachment seems to be required. And exactly what that
detachment is, nobody is certain of, but at least they are always certain one shouldn’t lose oneself.
One shouldn’t be so interfered with in one’s own mental and diagnostic and procedural work
because of emotional involvement with patient. So that group of people say that counter-
transference would be any emotional reaction on the part of the therapist if the therapist is losing
his or her objectivity.

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Conventional Use of the Term
The term counter-transference itself seems to boil down to three different categories of usage. In the
most classical, orthodox psychoanalytic discussion of this term, which is where the term originally
comes from, it is said that the counter-transference is any emotional response that the therapist
brings to the situation that obstructs the situation, that interferes with the free flow of patient’s
speech. The second usage of the term is that counter-transference is the emotional response of the
therapist, which is counter to, in reaction to, the transference projection made upon the therapist
by the patient. That is, unconsciously, to a degree, the therapist is not reacting to the client (the
other as such), but is responding to, in his or her own dynamic processes, the projection that is
being implanted in them by the other. Does that make sense? There seems to be a third possibility,
which I think is interesting, at least more interesting than the other two. This is a complicated one:
that there’s a counter-transference and transference on both sides. Boil it down to that. And the
intensive psychotherapy, or the intensive relationship, is one that would explore both the
transference illusion that one projects onto another and also the counter-transference response that
one has toward another because . . . you know, do you get it? It’s like a four-way street.
This is the way the discussion goes in psychological literature and I thought I should begin at
least by mentioning what’s been done. The dilemma for therapists actually doing this work, or
anyone involved with intimate relationships, is that they don’t know what is the right thing to do
when they feel stuck. They feel doubtful about their own integrity in their work, and they feel
questioning of their own capabilities and usefulness to another person—and this is what the issue
of counter-transference gives rise to. No one wants to be accused of losing objectivity and neutrality
and usefulness. On the other hand, no one wants to lapse into the shell of a completely professional
relationship. So that is the problem that beginning therapists especially are faced with. I say
“beginning therapists especially” because they are the ones that seem to feel it with the most
intensity, but in fact everyone feels it, and everyone feels it all the time.

Neurosis of the Dedicated Therapist: Rescue, Cure, Professionalism

There is a particular counter-transference response that seemingly is a part of our culture and is
especially part of the general medical culture, which is quite neurotic, and we should spend a
moment thinking about that. That is what has been called the “dedicated therapist,” the “neurosis

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of the dedicated therapist.”14 The dedicated therapist is completely involved with the care,
nurturing, and development of the person they are working with. They exhaust themselves in such
an endeavor. However, they feel extremely righteous and clearly on the side of the good. They do
everything they can for their patients. It is somewhat the stereotype maybe of the general
practitioner up until the 1940s. My father was one of those. It is a person who sees in themselves a
lack of professional ethic, lack of integrity, if they become aware of their aggressive or even sadistic
impulses toward their patients. It is the person who says they “would die with their boots on with
their patients.” And they usually die in their patients’ homes, actually. The problem with this, as
much as it is culturally accepted and considered to be a medically-responsible attitude to take, is
that it is coming from a particular attitude toward pain and pain of the other. And that attitude is
one that is, you can say, omnipotently-based therapeutic concern; that in fact, the omnipotently-
based aspect of it is that the healer, therapist, is actually trying to maintain their own self-esteem,
their own presumption at healing, in this rescue attempt that they’re involved with.
Such dedicated therapists fall into three different neurotic styles. One is, they’re involved with
a rescue attempt. That they are rescuing this other person and they take enormous gratification and
satisfaction out of being so useful, so needed to the other person. A second style is, they actually
believe that they are curing someone and they find again much satisfaction, and much usefulness
about their lives because they’re doing that. They find it intolerable and a major insult to their own
self-esteem when, in fact, that doesn’t happen. The degree of suicide among dedicated,
omnipotently based, therapeutically concerned therapists is large. The third style of the dedicated
therapist that is at least as bad as the first two, or even worse: complete professionalism. So, the first,
the rescue attempt we could relate with passion, passionate relationship toward other. The absolute
cure is that of aggression. “You will be cured if I have anything to do with it.” The third, the
professionalism approach is more related to denial or ignorance. The ignorance here is something
of a very special kind, that is to say, an ignorance of something very special. An ignorance of

14. The “neurosis of the dedicated therapist” is a reference to Harold Searles’ chapter, “The ‘Dedicated Physician’ in
the Field of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis,” in his Countertransference and Related Subjects (1979). This paper is an
excellent, in-depth exploration of this neurotic pattern by Dr. Searles who was Ed's primary mentor and training
analyst. Searles writes that “the ‘dedicated therapist’ . . . feels under such intense pressure to cure the patient, goes
on oblivious of his placing, in his dedication, equally great pressure upon the patient” (77). He states:
A dozen years ago I reached the conviction that it is folly to set out to rescue the patient from the dragon of
schizophrenia: the patient is both the maiden in the dragon’s grip and the dragon itself. The dragon is the
patient’s resistance to becoming ‘sane’—resistance which shows itself as a tenacious and savage hostility to the
therapist’s efforts. (75) —J. Fortuna

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something that is very special to human beings, and that is, ignoring the fact that the person whom
you are having an intimate, concerned, hopefully helpful relationship with is going through all of
this about you. That inherent in this healing relationship—whoever it is that calls themselves healer
and whoever labels themselves patient, that one in need of help—that both of their basic human
intention in this relationship is one of healing. One of these people may call themselves the
designated, labeled, alleged healer. The other, similarly, patient. But in fact, what is happening is that
there are two people trying to heal each other. That is why the transference and counter-
transference going on on both sides seems to be so applicable.

Passion and Compassion in the Human Realm

To get at this issue further, we have to, I believe, look more closely at what we call human-beingness,
the human realm and its potentialities to develop, cultivate healing relationships. Work in intensive
psychotherapy––we generally call this IP in order to shorten the syllables, which I object to as too-
quick modern shorthand, so I prefer to call it intensive psychotherapy––brings out a particularly
otherwise unnoticed aspect of human-beingness that is generally not seen in any other
philosophical, psychological, experimental approach to human relationship. Because of the
peculiarities of intensive psychotherapy and those issues of human behavior that it highlights and
magnifies, it is clear that whomever you are working with is also working with you. Know it or not.
And sooner or later, that is either acknowledged or fails to be acknowledged. The failure to
acknowledge that, the failure to respect that, the failure to be appreciative of that, is the major
single cause of neurotic counter-transference and the ignorance that leads one to becoming ever
more increasingly “professional.”
It seems to be a not very likable thing for therapists to acknowledge. It seems therapists would
consider that a hindrance to their work and an obstruction, a needless, perhaps altruistic, attitude
on the part of the patient toward them. They are quick to label it some form of transference, some
form of illusion carried over from past relationships into the present, as some form of neurosis in
itself—and it is not neurosis. It is the same inspiration, the same heartfelt connection with the
possibility of being useful, that therapists have and that has led anyone to a therapeutic career at
all. It is in fact a passionate endeavor, something that the client, patient, other has been born with,
so to speak, just as we have—and the intensive psychotherapeutic relationship brings it out. I don’t
know another way to put that. It just brings that out. Ignoring that response by the other, no matter

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what the relationship is, leads to one degree of professionalism or other. You should recognize, I
believe very much, that whomever you are working with is working with you. They are trying to
make the best therapist out of you that they can. They are trying to bring you up. They are trying
to make you a person that they can respect. They are trying to make you a person that can teach
them something. They’re doing this all the time. When they’re not doing it, interestingly enough,
they feel poorly about themselves.
So, it’s that aspect of human-beingness that I wanted to focus on. We are a species, a realm, a
kingdom of beings that has at its focal point a passionate relationship with the world. We have
capabilities (like none of the other kingdoms, realms, and domains of living beings) that are capable
of imagining the results of our actions and of actually reveling in them before we have actually
begun to act. We are capable of imagining the course of our desire. We’re capable of completely
celebrating the fulfillment of our desire before we’ve even begun to do anything about it. We’re
easily frustrated and easily disappointed in our desire and we talk about having broken hearts. We
talk about being let down by the other. We are so other-oriented. We are so other-oriented in our
communication, in our desire, in all our fantasies, all our wants, all our dislikes, all our paranoias;
everything is involved with this mate, with this other, who will be with us and for us. It’s our thing.
It’s our passion. And that passion is exposed in its very raw, naked nature in psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy depends on it—along with a lot of other things that depend on it like children—but
psychotherapy definitely depends on it.
At the same time, we have definite capacities. Within this illusion and frustration of passion,
we have a capacity to be alone and we have a capacity for concern for others. These are two aspects
of human realm. The human realm has evolved and developed to an exquisite degree of perfection
and these are the two aspects of human-beingness that need so much to be developed in the
therapeutic relationship.
Counter-transference then, from this point of view, needs to take into account a number of
things that it generally doesn’t have to deal with. It has to take into account that the full range,
again, of the human equipment, standard equipment, of our human-beingness is relevant and is
being used in intimate relationships—and particularly, in healing relationships. Although intimate
relationships highlight human relationships in general, we could say that healing relationships
highlight intimate relationships in general. Healing depends on that intimacy and that intimacy
must be unobstructed. Counter-transference, at least in its neurotic aspect, interferes with the

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openness and availability of the full range of our emotions. The openness we’re talking about is not
so easy to come by. People have struggled in every psychotherapeutic tradition of how to achieve
that openness, how to cultivate that openness, and how to make that openness have the
characteristic of fearlessness in a relationship. Later we will talk about this sane aspect of counter-
transference.

Developing Openness: Joining Personal and Interpersonal Practices

An interesting description of counter-transference comes out of the English psychoanalytic
tradition from Donald Winnicott,15 whom some people might be familiar with. He struggled and
worked with this dilemma of neutrality versus intimacy as it arose in his own experience. This was
generally the work of acknowledging the appearance of counter-transference, the appearance of
the emotional response of the therapist. Acknowledging it, being open to it, being fearlessly open
to it.16

15. One of Ed's favorite papers was by Donald Winnicott, “Hate in the Counter-transference,” which is readily
available on the internet (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 1949, 30:69–74). Ed may be referring to this
paper in this presentation. This paper summarizes Winnicott’s explorations of counter-transference phenomena,
where he described three kinds. The third kind he describes as, “From these [first] two [conventional forms] I
distinguish the truly objective counter-transference, or if this is difficult, the analyst’s love and hate reaction to the
actual personality and behaviour of the patient, based on objective observation.” This is described as a broad form
of counter-transference that is objective in the sense that it is an understandable and normal reaction to the patient’s
actual personality and behavior. I recommended reading this paper, as Ed often did for us. I was informed by
Winnicott’s hyphenated spelling of “counter-transference” for this current transcript. It is worth noting that Ed also
strongly recommended that his students read Winnicott’s classic paper “Fear of Breakdown.” —J. Fortuna
16. Ed first encountered “the work” while a graduate student. Upon reading a paper by Harold Searles, whom he
eventually studied with, he thought, “What impressed me was the fearlessness to use every aspect of one’s own mind
in the service of the therapeutic process. It was just that kind of courage that I realized I wanted to learn in order to
work with my own life and to live it more fully” (Recovering Sanity 2003, 322). Coincidentally, I, a close student of Ed
for twenty-five years, had exactly the same realization while in graduate school at age twenty-four. I am certain that
our deep desire to learn such “work” brought us together. We both came to realize that the core practice of daily
meditation enhances process-note-based supervision, intentional dreaming, personal therapy, and feedback from
others. These become effective disciplines to develop awareness in all aspects of one’s own mind.
At first, awareness seems like an introspective tool that observes experience from a neutral distance. As awareness
matures on the path of the work, experience becomes more embodied, intimate, direct, and suffused with wakeful
clarity. Direct here means real and genuine, free of the projective strategies of thought, concept, and memory. Direct
awareness naturally carries over to relationships as the pure intention of kindness to oneself and others.
Psychological insight will simply happen. The intention of the work is to render the opaque boundaries between the
mind’s unconscious, subconscious, and the conscious aspects to be more permeable. In order for the therapeutic
process to be effective, we each need our full field of experience to be integrated and available in relationship. This
awareness practice further bound Ed and I together, along with many others, in the healing work. He comments,
“Because of this, doing basic attendance work becomes a means for one’s personal path of becoming a more
responsive human being” (Recovering Sanity, 279). —J. Fortuna

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 Here in the United States, when we talk about contemplative psychotherapy we mean specifically
the work that the therapist does with their mind. Of course, this is the issue of meditation practice
and this is the issue of contemplative psychotherapy, which is simply the joining of personal practice
and interpersonal practice. It is the merging of meditation practice and therapeutic discipline. No
one knows what’s really going to come out of that. We are presenting that at Naropa as the name
of our program and the basic aspect of all our course work and internship work. But we know that
one highlights the other, that meditation practice cultivates one’s ability to do interpersonal
therapeutic work, and therapeutic work or intimate relationship with other cultivates our
meditation practice.
In a sense they are inseparable and a name has been given for that inseparability in the
Buddhist tradition. It has been called the Mahayana vehicle, where personal and interpersonal
practices merge and fertilize each other. So, we are taking advantage of that very traditional and
very romantic and very dramatic possibility of joining the two practices. It seems that the practice
of meditation adds a whole other dimension to the problems of counter-transference. The practice
of meditation, as I think most people here know, is one that generates a fearless attitude toward
thought processes and emotional processes of every kind. It is exactly that attitude that has been
wanting, has been almost as if lusted for, in the psychotherapeutic tradition. It boggles my mind
that we have talked about meditation to therapists for how many years now? Twelve, fourteen
years. It boggles my mind that therapists have not clicked to this immediately. That they have not
seen that this is the most important thing that they could do in order to take the next step, a further
step in the development of their capabilities of working with people, of their understanding of the
nature of mind, and of their developing capabilities within themselves of going further—much
further—with their therapeutic practice. But, it hasn’t happened, hasn’t happened. This is the
situation that meditation practice seems to be the answer to: the counter-transference dilemma;
the dilemma of getting too close or too far. The acknowledgment of the total range of human
responses that we have and how to work with them and how to put them back into the therapeutic
relationship, seems to be answered by joining the two practices. In the most general sense of all,
counter-transference is said to be that which interferes with the attention that a therapist has
toward a patient, in its most general sense. And in its most general sense, meditation practice deals
with that which interferes with attention of any kind.

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 In the next session we will discuss more about how to take counter-transference out of this
realm of its neurotic interference level and how to make it more the ground base of intimate healing
relationship. I realize I’ve given a very schematic picture and questions would help flesh this out.

Student: You mentioned the response of the patient, to care for his therapist. I would like you to
say something about that. But my own take on that is to acknowledge that in the relationship . . .
to give him some kind of feedback so that he becomes more aware of what he’s doing and that it’s
okay in the relationship. If that makes sense.
Ed: Somewhat like telling another person that their sexual desires are okay. I don’t know. It
might be somewhat patronizing. It might. At least we should consider that. What I’m referring to
is more of an attitude that we as therapists should acknowledge and be respectful of. It seems like
you’re now getting more into the aspect of interpretation or meaningful communication, where
one might say to another, “Yes, you are doing this to help me.” Well, it seems that there are times
when that might be necessary but generally, at least we, in our bones, should acknowledge that.
Whether we do it out loud or not is another thing depending on a lot of other factors. But we
should be appreciative of that. Very appreciative of that. We couldn’t work without that, actually.
S: Well, let me add this to it. I have felt this more with friends, but I have felt it a little bit with
clients, where I feel like because I’m helping them and helping them, they really feel like they have
a need to help me back.
Ed: So, I mean, tit for tat?
S: Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, “Thanks a lot for what you’ve done for me, but allow
me to delve into your problems, too.” And sometimes, like I say, especially with some friends, I feel
like that’s what they’re doing, trying to even out the score a little bit. Because I’m getting the upper
hand. Because I’m listening to their problems, and I’m giving them suggestions, and I would
imagine (you have more experience than I do) that it might come up in my work with clients, but
maybe I’m wrong about that.
Ed: Yes, I think I know what you’re talking about, but this is slightly different than I owe you
something. This is more inherent in being born human, being born as a child with mother and father
who you have relationship with. This urge to be useful goes a long way back, before there was any
conception of give-and-take, and I’ll do this for you if you do this for me. This is more primitive than
that and throughout one’s life this has been subject to a lot of conditions. This urge has been
possibly inhibited, or frustrated, or distorted, or displaced, or transformed in a large variety of ways.

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And that is what makes many of us patients, actually. The obstruction of our passion, the failure
of the development of our compassion, is what makes any of us patients. So, the recovery of anyone
is the recovery of that human-beingness, a recovery of that passion, and compassionate possibilities
out of that. There is no healing without the recovery of passion and recovery is not making it fresh
from scratch. Recovery means it is being uncovered and being clarified and being liberated, so to
speak, for usefulness. So, this point of view is saying that it’s always there and that it’s being
expressed in a variety of disguised and distorted ways.
S: I do not want to belabor this, but are you saying that there seems to be room in the
relationship for the client to express that part of him, that’s part of his cure, and you as his therapist
have to relate to the situation.
Ed: That’s right, yes. If you don’t relate to it, then you’re courting counter-transference of
different kinds. Particularly, as I said before, the professional counter-transference that seems to be
especially based on ignoring this very quality of relationship. “I don’t need your help. I am who I
am. I know what I’m doing. I’ve done it a lot of times before without you.” Right?
S: Thank you.

Student: I think I understand a little bit about how the practice of meditation affects being with
people, but you also mentioned the reverse and I’m not sure I understand that very well. Could
you say something about that?
Ed: The reverse: of how the practice of relating to people cultivates meditation? Well, again,
this is something we’ll possibly speak about more later, but the idea of meditation is to come to
know oneself completely. To get close to oneself, to get thoroughly familiar with oneself. To go
into the flesh, into the bones of oneself so that one can acknowledge the flesh and the bones and
the being and the blood of oneself so one can actually be oneself, which means one can actually be
a human being, not hide from it anymore. So, but what for? What is any of that for? If you don’t
take it out to the world, it’s some sort of masturbation, which could be in the end some perversion
of the meditation. You only know why you’re doing it when you work with people. You only
understand why you’re meditating at all when you begin to work with people. It’s the only time it
makes any real sense. They just go together. You could have the most clear, beautiful, lucid,
crystalline consciousness in the world sitting in the room by yourself. Useless. And when you work
with people, you just seem to understand why you’re meditating, why your inspiration to do the
practice is going further and further. Because you just see its meaningfulness.

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 S: Well, when you were saying that, it made sense to me, but I also thought that there are times
when I’m practicing when I know why I’m practicing then and when I go out—then I’m not sure.
Ed: That’s what we’re going to talk about in the next session. We’re going to talk about how to
make counter-transference sane, how to make it not a neurotic obstruction to relationship, but how
to make it give rise to further intimacy rather than further detachment. That when you’re out in
the world, it makes complete sense. Out in the world is working with people, right?
S: Yes, right.

Student: I’m going to read what I wrote that I think you said, “The client is working at making
me the best therapist I can be. They need to look up to me, feel my wisdom. If they fail at this, they
will feel poorly about themselves.”
Ed: Could you do a take from the second sentence, second phrase.
S: “If they fail at this, they will feel poorly about themselves.”
Ed: Before that. Start the whole thing over, because there’s something I don’t agree with, even
if I said it.
S: That’s why I wanted to check it out. “The client is working at making me the best therapist
I can be. “They need to look up to me.”
Ed: Did I say that?
S: “Feel my wisdom. If they fail at this, they will feel poorly about themselves.” I wanted to
check it out because I wasn’t sure if I heard it right. In looking at the first part of that statement,
can you enlarge that, on the four-lane blacktop that you were talking about?
Ed: About the what?
S: “The four-lane blacktop.” The counter-transference, transferential issues that go on in
people working at making each other the best that they can be.
Ed: Well, like you’re doing it right now. Just in the sense of trying to bring out some further
clarity, or make me say what I really mean. Overcome the jargon of the four-way this and the
three-way that. That very impulse, in a sense, is what we’re talking about. In a sense it’s just a
question to clarify the contents of some speech and a combination of words, but in fact you want
me to tell the truth. So that’s really all I mean by that. Insofar as the other has therapeutic concern
for you, there is possible counter-transference obstruction to that. Whether that other be a therapist
or a patient. That’s why it’s four ways. Say something more.
S: It’s difficult for me to conceptualize it.

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 Ed: Well, then I’ve created a problem, a conceptual problem with it. It’s back to the original
slogan: that you think you’re entering another person’s world, but in fact they’ve entered yours.
So, in that sense, the whole thing is going both ways. Because it is going both ways. Everybody has
illusions and expectations about the other, which we might say is transference. Everybody has
desire and concern for the other’s welfare and interferences with that, which we call counter-
transference. Four ways. We’re both working with transference and counter-transference all the
time. Sometimes they get very confusing. Any better?

Student: I’m currently in the first year of the MA program here at Naropa, and for the last
quarter it has seemed like I’ve become more and more and more doubtful of how helpful I can be
to anybody. And I guess the feeling I’m getting this evening is that I’m doubtful of my doubt and
doubtful of my own motive, however wonderful it seems. The interesting thing for me is contrasting
that with my own practice of what I consider to be Mahayana Buddhism and the kind of clarity
and straightforwardness of that in my own taking on another’s pain, giving out good things
(whatever they could be), and basically working fearlessly, working with doubt. I have a very hard
time trying to reconcile those two feelings. Maybe you’re going to talk about this later.
Ed: Two feelings?
S: Yes, this overwhelming bottomless pit of depression that I seem to be caught in at this point,
and the kind of pleasure, personal pleasure, and personal hopefulness that I get out of the actual
practice of meditation.
Ed: Well, we have the maitri program coming up soon. Are you going to that?
S: Yes.
Ed: Well, just give yourself some room. You don’t have to make up your mind whether you
want to be therapist or not right now. Give yourself some room to experience that practice.
Whether you want to be a therapist or not, you’re going to love it. I know you will. Don’t make up
your mind about whether you’re ready to be a therapist or not, whether that’s really the thing you
should do, whether that’s your basic inspiration. Every therapist lives with that doubt to some
degree or other and you were accepted into the program for a number of different reasons, meeting
a number of different criteria, the primary one being that your inspiration to work with other
people was acknowledged. So maybe you don’t acknowledge it as much and you should work with
that. It’s not a big deal whether you’re a therapist or not.

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 S: It seems to have much more far-reaching effects than that, however. I can’t speak for
anybody else in the other years, but it doesn’t seem like anybody gets any saner. I have friends in
the second-year program who are constantly . . .
Ed: Don’t tell tales, now. Just speak of yourself. So, we see people who do the program and
seem to be useful and do good work. It seems to be working and maybe it will work for you. We’ll
see. Good luck.

Clinical supervision groups highlight another aspect of counter-transference that we haven’t

talked about. Supervision in the sense that a person in the group actually makes a presentation of
another person. Now this other person may be a patient, may not be a patient, could be one’s own
mother, father, brother, sister, delinquent son, child with autism, etc. The idea of this is to present
another human being from their point of view. The way we have devised to do that, a definite
practice to do that—which everyone who has been through Naropa’s psychology program is
somewhat familiar with—is that largely the other person’s pain and intelligence will become
apparent in this kind of presentation. It’s the kind of presentation that allows one to appreciate a
complete range of qualities of another, and it allows one to actually feel oneself into the
predicament of another person’s life. It’s basically, simply, this: that a description is made of the
patient’s body and environment, literally their gait, their posture, the surroundings that they live
in, the clothes that they wear. A truly novelistic description. Secondly, is a description of speech.
Speech in the sense of how they communicate. Not necessarily, not simply, the literal speech,
rhythm, and quality, and so on, but the quality of their relationship. And thirdly, is a description
of the aspect of mind. That is, again, not simply the contents of their mind, but how they handle
their mind: how they work their mind, how they deal with obsession, how they relate to speed of
mind or slowness of mind, whatever.
Again, this does not involve diagnosis or speculation, but it is pure description and it will expose
counter-transference without ever having to talk about it. So, that will give a whole other picture
of counter-transference that seemingly cannot be gotten any other way in supervision, or without
a great deal of difficulty. No matter how many times you’ve done it before, it is interesting to try

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to struggle and accomplish this little discipline. If you’ve been experienced in this, you might be
able to help other people learn it.17

17. This style of presentation became known as “Body-Speech-Mind Supervision.” Ed briefly describes this
discipline in Recovering Sanity (2003). For example, “The effect of this way of presenting is to heighten the
possibilities of exchange––with the therapist for the patient, and with the group for both the patient and the
therapist” (281). There are two papers that describe this method in detail: “A Contemplative Approach to Clinical
Supervision,” Bonnie Rabin and Robert Walker, Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy 1987, Volume IV
(https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d321225feea1100018208e9/t/5dda0b95b53adb35ea84cb4b/15745709
05235/Windhorse-Archives-Naropa-JCPVol4-Contemplative-Approach-to-Clinical-Supervision) and “A
Discipline of Inquisitiveness: The ‘Body-Speech-Mind Approach’ to Contemplative Supervision,” Robert Walker,
Brilliant Sanity 2008, chapter 9. This supervision method has been practiced and developed over the last forty years
at Naropa University, the Windhorse Project, and wherever contemplative psychotherapists work together. —J.
Fortuna

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 II.

Phases of Patient-Therapist Interaction

T his a tour of counter-transference, which is traditionally called “journey with concept”—in

this case a journey with an experience of relating to counter-transference phenomena. The
journey sometimes is difficult, but you asked for it and hopefully there are some guidelines to relate
with. And they are not so easy either.
So, most people here have had some experience with the supervision groups and have tasted
the experience of “clean presentation.” Clean in the sense of descriptive and what comes up during
that. What comes up during that is a particular phenomenon that is not only related to presenting
itself, not only about the experience of the presenter, but also the experience of the listener. From
the early days of intensive psychotherapy, a guideline was recommended by Professor Freud
himself, before the words transference and counter-transference were invented to be what they are or
what they’re supposed to be today. He said very early in the text The Interpretation of Dreams (1899),
when he was about to embark on a description of his own dreams, he gave this caution and this
plea, almost, before he presented the first of his own dreams. He said, and I paraphrase:

This might be embarrassing to me and I can only ask that you extend yourself in reading
about some of the details of my intimate life and that you try to understand this, understand
it in a particular way, understand it in a way of make my interests your own. Grant me
that, do me that favor. Feel yourself into my place before you make any judgments about
my condition and my dreams.

He also said, in his first-published use of the word transference, “Make this transference to me.” Later
on, the issue of transference got to be much more complicated and supposedly sophisticated, but
at this sort of primitive, possibly even generic, level, the issue of transference was the issue of “feel
yourself into my realm, my place in the world.” It was a request for the generosity of the listener.
So, in a sense, this whole aspect of counter-transference involves the issue of generosity, which
means at the most-simple level of extending ourselves, or extending our boundaries, of who we
think we are and what we think we’re doing, to encompass, include the other person.18

18. Here is Freud’s complete quote that Ed is referencing:

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Generosity and Courage in Healing Traditions
The issue, as with listening to a dream of someone else’s, is that it is difficult to tell, and one doesn’t
need really to tell the difference, of who is who, of who is the dreamer and who is the listener. In
this case there is a sense of mixing and a sense of exchange. Exchanging oneself for other. So, the
discipline of exploring counter-transference in terms of supervision is that—as we talked about in
the last session and as many of you have done in this session—you present a case, and that case is
your case. You speak for that case, you present that case, that other person’s point of view, that
other person’s dilemma in the world, as if you were holding a piece of fruit in your hand and
describing it to someone else who couldn’t see it. And that is an analogy, a metaphor, for presenting
teachings of any kind to other people.
So, the interpersonal practice of discriminating and being further awakened to, aware of,
counter-transference experiences is a sense of journey, a sense of further development for therapists
or anyone involved in helping or healing relationships. This journey presents that challenge and
opportunity at the same time, of extending oneself and of cultivating one’s own capabilities of
generosity, which seem to be a great deal more possible than we generally think of in ourselves.
That, in fact, the possibilities seem to be limitless. They are said to be limitless, if only we have the
discipline and the patience to practice them. So, the interpersonal practice building upon,
advancing from, our personal mindfulness-awareness practice becomes a tremendous opportunity
for personal development. In that sense we, as therapists or helpers of anyone who comes within
our domain, have a great deal of opportunity and a great deal of gratefulness to those people,
especially to those people who cause us problems. It is an opportunity to develop what is called this
limitless generosity, and the opportunity to bring to full flower our personal practice. So, we are
very lucky in that way. We should not complain about the burden of being therapists.

But I have other difficulties to overcome, which lie within myself. There is some natural hesitation about
revealing so many intimate facts about one’s mental life; nor can there be any guarantee against
misinterpretation by strangers. But it must be possible to overcome such hesitations. Every psychologist is under
an obligation to confess even his own weaknesses, if he thinks that it may throw light upon some obscure
problem. And it is safe to assume that my readers too will very soon find their initial interest in the indiscretions
which I am bound to make replaced by an absorbing immersion in the psychological problems upon which they
throw light. Accordingly, I shall proceed to choose out of one of my own dreams and demonstrate upon it my
method of interpretation. In the case of every such dream some remarks by way of preamble will be necessary.—
And now I must ask the reader to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me,
into the minutest details of my life; for a transference of this kind is peremptorily demanded by our interest in
the hidden meaning of dreams. (105–106) —J. Fortuna

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 It is a quick path, intense—puts all our practice right on the spot, into full immediacy of
relationship. You don’t have to be gifted to do it. You don’t have to be fortunate or necessarily
healthy to do it, but once you are on this kind of path of personal development by working with
others, you’re really on it. You can back out, and sometimes we need to back out and take some
time to cultivate other areas of our life. But when we are in it, we should be fully in it and take
advantage of this opportunity within the human realm, which is always there, but rare to actually
do it in the way we are presuming to do it. That is, joining a tradition of healers, which, in any
tradition we look at (wherever there was talk and longing for a sacred world, whatever you might
consider that to be), whenever a healing tradition evolved out of that, it has been said to be warrior
path. So, it is a path of some personal bravery—which meant some personal sacrifice, and the
development of a quality of personal health—that has always been regarded as the prerequisite for
leadership in any tribal society. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, whoever, they were all medicine men to
begin with. It is quite a powerful tradition, quite a powerful opportunity, and there are things to
be done that make one courageous and daring enough to do this kind of work. We should be proud
of being part of that tradition and now we have to look at some of the disciplines that need to be
imposed upon us so that we can do this properly and not lapse into what we have seemingly
tentatively called the three evils, the three problems, three obstacles of rescue, cure, and
professionalism.

Illness of the Therapist as the Ground of Kindness

The disciplines of a healer, in this sense, are of dissolving the restrictions that one habitually places
on oneself so that a further and richer quality of openness can be developed. That openness is the
necessary quality before any meaningful communication can take place, or, as we will talk about
in the next session, communication in the sense of interpretation. In this sense, counter-
transference restriction or constrictions, or counter-transference prejudices, could be cut through.
Their very appearance, their arising in the field of awareness, is the inspiration to go beyond them.
It is the springboard to take the next step in the mutual entering between therapist and patient,
oneself and other. So, it is a discipline that is needed in order to overcome one’s inhibitions to do
that and actually one’s embarrassment about doing that. We could talk a long time about our own
embarrassment about doing that, but that would lead us, eventually, into a discussion of counter-
transference.

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 So perhaps we could think of beginning a metaphor for this discipline, of extending ourselves,
this sense of sacrifice, so to speak, as an image of the illness of the therapist. A therapist’s own
suffering with wound. I’m not exactly sure that this means the same as has been talked about for a
long time as the “wounded healer.” I’m not certain. But, we don’t need to go to any classical or
typical images for this because it’s personal experience. It’s personal experience of being ill and in
pain, sometimes in a great deal of pain, and carrying on one’s work in being a therapist, helper.
I think everyone knows this experience to one degree or other. This illness and pain could be
physical or psychological. It could be a literal, physical wound that one is living with and working
with in front of another person, or it could be a neurotic upheaval of any kind. What happens
under these conditions is that there seems to be a kind of softness that develops in the therapist’s
frame of mind and body. An acute, sometimes exquisite, sensitivity to another person’s pain. The
usual response to one’s own physical pain is impatience with other people. One is easily frustrated
and can lash out with a sense of “don’t put another atom of pain into my atmosphere. I am already
overloaded. I’m already burdened. I can’t deal with what I have.” But if, for a moment, one can
tame that superficial reflex and stay with one’s own sense of pain, a tremendous degree of patience
can develop. It’s exquisite in a way. Not to try to make this into a masochistic procedure, but
nevertheless, we will all face this if we haven’t already. There’s no one here who is really that
healthy. Everybody here has some kind of illness going on, in their nose, throat, chest, and so on.
Everybody here has some deformity or other. There is no perfect specimen of the species, any
museum piece that I can see right now. There’s something wrong with every one of you. So, let’s
not be too pure about our body or our mind. We’re all working with illness one way or the other.
Frequently that illness reaches an extreme degree and you might have the impulse to call your
agency and your secretary and your whatever and say, “Cancel my appointments for today. I’m
not up to it.” And I believe that is the wrong move, and an exaggerated sense of protection. I hope
you realize that if you have a severe, infectious disease that you don’t need to spread that around,
but barring that, you should take the opportunity to work when you are ill. It is a special
opportunity. Special in the sense that it is an exaggerated form of the situation that we are living
with day to day, in any case. We could get to know that more thoroughly.
This softness or sensitivity to pain in our own body, and mind, allows us to experience, witness,
and identify with pain of other. In a sense, it is a kind of a precious opportunity because it certainly
cuts through any superiority that we might have and feel about our sense of help and health. The

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ground of that is one’s own illness and pain. The path of that is how that pain could become
gentleness. The end result or fruition of that process is that there’s a development in oneself and
the other person at the same time of a degree of kindness, or what we call maitri, toward oneself
and other. We realize that we can live with pain. That it is not an alien part of our life. That it is
actually energy and fuel of our life. In the scriptures of the bodhisattva path, it is often said that
one learns more from pain than one learns from health.
The basic idea is that kindness toward one’s own pain, and whatever else appears as obstacles
or obstructions to one’s mind, is the energy that one could work with, and to have gratefulness
toward that at the same time. This seems to be the necessary requirement before one can fully
involve oneself in this thing called exchange.

Exchange as Self-Induced Counter-Transference

At this point, we might call exchange a self-induced counter-transference. It is different from a self-
inflicted wound. It’s self-induced because it is part of one’s own development as well as the
development of others. The intention is very different. The intention now is the same as we
suggested in terms of listening to someone else’s dream. To make oneself a part of the whole
process—to be fully involved with the dream, to actually visualize the dream—as the dreamer tells
it. To enter the dream. If your mind wanders at that point while listening to someone tell you their
dream, if you think that you only have twenty minutes to get to the hardware store and back to do
the errand to fix the leaking plumbing, and you miss even a phrase of the dream, you realize how
close you are to dreaming yourself in a supposedly awake state. Immediately you fill the gap with
a phrase, with an image of your own, and if you happen to ask a question or make a comment
about the dream at that time, you seem totally ridiculous as if you’ve been out of the room for half
an hour. It might provoke, should provoke, the other person (the dreamer) to wake you up. And
they would do that in their own ways. So, the self-induced counter-transference means that we
could disarm ourselves. Disarm ourselves from rescuer, curer, or professional and enter a new stage
of “phases of patient-therapist interaction,” which is supposedly the title of this session.

Phases of Relationship
Phases of interaction we could say are the phases of the interaction in any relationship. But the
psychotherapeutic healing relationship, which is a caricature of human relationships in general, is

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always talked about as having phases. There is beginning, middle, and end. Simple. That’s what
Aristotle said about tragedy when asked what Greek tragedy was. He said, “Well, it has a
beginning, middle, and an end.” Everybody thought that was very profound, and in a sense it was,
that a tragedy could have an end to it. But all relationships, in a way, have beginning, middle, and
end. Each time we meet with anyone in a so-called session, it has a beginning, middle, and an end.
Anytime someone tells you a dream, there’s a beginning, middle, and end of the dream. If you look
at any one fragment of the dream, dream image, there seems to be a past, a present, and an implied
future to that image. That, in fact, every moment of perception and communication has a
beginning, middle, and end if one looks closely enough at it. That, in fact, phases of relationship
would be none other than the fact that there is birth and death of the relationship happening in
any one moment of it.
So, in terms of healing discipline, we could look at another meaning, perhaps even more
microscopic, of the sense of phases. This is especially involved with the sense of what the therapist
has to do, what discipline has to be performed, in order to break down the boundaries and the
barriers of the three problems of rescuer, curer, or professional. (I am sorry to keep saying that over
and over again, but I think it’s important enough for me to implant that image in you.) This
discipline, as most of you well know, is called the “discipline of exchange,” and is otherwise talked
of as the discipline of giving in. It’s not giving up. It’s anything but that. It’s anything but giving
up. It is not giving up. It is giving in. It’s not dropping out; it’s moving in further toward the
situation. It’s the energy of counter-transference that is the reminder for us to do this. Counter-
transference, from this point of view, is a practice of recollection.

Counter-Transference as Reminder to Practice Exchange

The formal practice of exchange, or what is called the main practice, takes place within a
meditation session, as if sandwiched by mindfulness-awareness practice. As most people know, this
is a discipline that takes place within the Buddhist tradition, within the Shambhala tradition, and
within the Naropa tradition of training. It is the only way to sanitize the counter-transference.
The basic format, without going into too much detail about it, is what is called “sending and
taking,” or “giving out and accepting.” This means that simply enough, naively enough, one can
actually give away one’s sense of a feeling of health, which is seemingly easier to do when one feels
ill. Equally, it means taking on and accepting—making part of oneself—the other person’s turmoil,

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pain, ill-humor, or depression. And it is an alternating process. That one can take this in, make it
part of oneself and, at the same time, give one’s sense of health or goodness or pleasure out to the
other person. In the main practice, in the formal practice, it is actually done, as you may know, in
using the vehicle of breath, just as we do in mindfulness-awareness practice. We can actually
breathe it in, give it up, and send it off.
It’s not something that one does in interpersonal practice when with another person. Not
literally. But that same attitude, which is cultivated, or almost cultured, during formal practice,
pervades the interpersonal practice. It is an attitude, and attitude becomes a way of being so that
eventually, it’s said that if one practices this formally and informally (meditation and post-
meditation) long enough, it becomes almost natural. It’s never quite completely natural as there
always is some sense of effort involved. The counter-transference phenomena arising in our state
of mind is the recollection, the reminder, to adopt this attitude. Essentially it is warrior-like because
the initial feeling of sacrifice is involved. When adolescents of the Great Plains Indians went on a
retreat, such as a fast, they would meet with their grandmothers. The grandmother would literally
take a piece of her skin, of her flesh, and offer it to the adolescent going on his first retreat, to take
that with him. That sense of sacrifice and well-meaning is a reminder that other people have
suffered, relinquished their aims and ambitions, for you to be able to better yourself in such a
practice.
So, a similar analogy is that one is able to do this practice of exchange because of some original
ground of gratefulness at all. That generosity has been extended toward us, for us to get this far in
our lives at all. Someone has done that, whether we still like them or not. Because of that, in an
instant, we could arouse such generosity in ourselves, such sense of sacrifice.
Giving out what we consider our health, and our sense of goodness, our sense of pleasure, is
obviously against the grain of things. That is not the way we ordinarily function. We would like
pleasure for ourselves and for other people to harbor the pain of the situation. That seems to be a
kind of a reflex and this discipline of exchange is interfering with that and in that very interference
becomes extremely, poignantly wakeful. If we do that continually, that wakefulness becomes less
of a burden to achieve and becomes a delightful thing to do. The formal practice of doing this
sending and taking is basically nothing by itself. We could do that all day long. You could breathe
in and out until you’re blue in the face just like we talked about with mindfulness-awareness
practice. Nothing happens. It actually has to be put into the real-life situation. At any time, there

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is the opportunity to do that. That’s the magnificence of this practice. At any time you are in the
company of another, or even right now, in the company of others who share this realm or others
who don’t share this realm, there’s the opportunity to do this practice. We don’t need any sort of
room. We don’t require any demarcated space to do it. It is always available and it is particularly
available and especially meaningful in therapeutic relationship.

Discriminating Awareness of Three Types of Laziness

So, it is said that this interpersonal practice is a further discipline that builds upon the
discriminating awareness of counter-transference. This is a practice of discriminating awareness of
one’s own counter-transference attitudes. Exchange practice is said to cut through the three
lazinesses. The three lazinesses are traditionally described as follows. The first laziness happens
upon hearing that such a practice of seeming sacrifice exists of giving out, giving away gifts of our
health that alternates with taking in the ominous presence of another’s illness. Suddenly, you say,
“That is too much for me. I already have it up to here. I can’t deal with another person’s problem
to this degree in my life at this time under these conditions,” and so on. It’s overwhelming. You
are hit by a tidal wave, crushed by it. Of course, that does not stop you from going out to dinner
and going to the movies ten minutes after saying that. But nevertheless, there is this first laziness.
The second laziness is thinking that this practice sounds fine, good enough to do; however,
there are other things that I like to do, that I’ve been taught how to do when working with people,
that are just as good as this. They’re equally important and as much as I admire the tradition of
healers, warriors, that do such things, I think that watching the videotapes of other people doing
interviews is also important. One is as good as the other. One technique is as good as the other.
The third laziness seems slightly more insidious. We rely on one particular technique, other
than exchanging self for other, that we select out of all the multitudes of techniques that have been
made available within the psychotherapeutic portion of the human realm. There are some 287
different techniques, brands, theories, and schools of psychotherapy listed in some handbook of
psychotherapy. We say, “This technique that I have maintains one of the three obstacles of rescue,
cure, or professionalism, and works much better than exchange. It is my personal duty to maintain
my objectivity, my neutrality, and my superiority in the situation involving health.” Again, these
three possibilities are: rescue is the passion to magnetize someone into one’s own version of health,
and to save them from their degraded environment; cure is the aggression to put one’s own health

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into them in a kind of Pygmalion issue of bringing them into a perfect image of one’s own health;
and professionalism is to be indifferent to counter-transference at all, and to ignore and avoid any
discipline and generosity that is needed in such a relationship.
I think that is as much as I need to say right now in terms of phases of relationship. There is
the possibility of acknowledging such phases from the level of the seasons, so to speak, of a whole
relationship down to the momentary give-and-take of the therapy interchange. That is considered
to be, in this tradition that I am presuming to represent, the moment of healing, of openness, and
communication.

Student: I liked your trip to the hardware store. I wonder, sometimes about coming into a session
fairly clean, hopefully, if that’s possible, such as not having had a fight with our husband or
whatever, and we’re listening to that person intently and we then find ourselves taking a trip to the
store in our head. Can we use that as useful counter-transference in assuming that somehow the
other person has also gone to the store, or he’s not quite with what he’s saying either? Could this
be a useful and therapeutic way to comment on our boredom or lack of attention or going out of
the room?
Ed: Well yes, I think that’s the idea. That your little mental trip to the store is a sudden moment
of wakefulness, which reminds you to jump back into the situation and jump back into the situation
in a particular way. You don’t have to suddenly make a major confession, “I was just out to lunch.
I didn’t hear what you said.” Although sometimes you have to do that. Certainly, in the dream, as
I mentioned, is that pinpoint of awareness. I don’t know exactly how that happens, why the dream
phenomena should be such a hypersensitive aspect of loss of awareness in the situation. But
certainly, in listening to the dream, if you recognize that happened, you do have to ask, “Could
you please repeat that?” But at other times, you don’t need to make a sudden confession. You
would just use it to move back in, as a reminder that exchange exists as a possibility for you and
that attitude of exchange could be aroused at a moment’s notice. If you do want to get back in,
that’s the way to really get back in. So yes, I think that’s exactly what we’re saying: we’re not trying
to eradicate counter-transference to create this sense of purity. And who is that clean, healthy,
pure, or uncontaminated as they begin to work with another person? And if we were, I can’t
imagine what we would be like. We would be so dazed by our own cleanliness that we couldn’t
really practice very well. So, the counter-transference is the energy, the fuel, of our being possibly
useful.

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 Student: I heard what you said about the limitlessness of fearlessness and generosity. I have a
question that relates to the warnings that very often you’d find in those handbooks by famous
psychiatrists that warn the therapist that is somewhat unprepared or green, who takes upon himself
a patient that is very difficult and for whom they might be unprepared. They warn the green
therapist about the damage . . .
Ed: Is it green you’re saying?
S: Green in the sense of not being quite experienced enough.
Ed: Beginner therapist’s mind.19
S: Yes. In taking up a task for which they are not quite prepared, and the damage that such a
therapist can inflict on their client. I am assuming that the intention of the therapist is good and
that there is perhaps some naiveté. So, I would like you to comment on that. I am also struck that
very often, these famous analysts seem to imply that there is some sort of diabolical game going on
on the part of the clients. In other words, the very difficult clients are playing a very heavy-handed
game in which the therapist must be an incredible, skillful exorcist. And I’ve read several of these
books in the last few months, so I’m getting worried. I’d like you to comment on what is the
boundary between being fearless and being responsible in what you can handle.
Ed: Generally, no one, especially the green ones, begins a therapeutic relationship without some
kind of supervision experience as a possible container. A container in the sense of how they might
learn further from their mistakes in the situation and how they might be more useful to other people
by cleaning up their mistakes at the same time that they are doing treatment. It embarrasses me to
think of the level of peoples’ problems that I worked with as my first cases being so green, and at
the same time, really having nobody to supervise me. I had to look for a long time to find someone
to supervise me because the place where I was working was focused on chemical treatment. One

19. With “beginner therapist’s mind” Ed is referring to the then-famous teaching by Suzuki Roshi presented in his book
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970):
Our “original mind” includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should
not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a
ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s
mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. (21)
Ed constantly warned his students to be wary of becoming a “professional” psychotherapist bloated with the pride
“that one understands the mind of others, that one knows what is best for them, and that one has the privilege of
imposing one’s will or prescription on them” (Recovering Sanity 2003, 335). Ed comment suggests one should always
remain a beginner in the best sense of the term, appreciating the open and fresh nature of one’s basic intelligence.
—J. Fortuna

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of the containers of the situation is supervision, and we don’t seem to be able to say that often
enough here in this psychology program. As much experience as new people have with supervision
and doing the discipline as we have been doing in the discussion groups, we find that people
graduate and continue their work and don’t involve themselves in supervision groups. It seems to
be frankly something like the second laziness. I don’t know what we are going to do about that but
it is so important that we have to do something. We should all put our heads together about this
issue and see how we can relate to the further process of maturation as therapists within supervision
discipline. I don’t know what these famous analysts mean other than the fact that they are probably
very wary of the quality of training of therapists at all and distrustful of the level of maturity of the
beginner therapist. You would have to make up your own mind about that, but certainly the
personal discipline of mindfulness-awareness practice goes a lot further than the more conventional
training of therapists, as we already know. The practices that we are involved with in terms of the
interpersonal practices, such as the ones we have been talking about in this session, go much further
even than that. If you do them you can actually take some kind of pride that you are doing them
and you can trust yourself further.
I don’t think there’s any case you can’t work with if you have the proper conditions, bottom
line. I think if you are actually practicing in the way that we are talking about, with a little bit of
supervision, you could trust yourself to work with an autistic child right now, and that’s the heaviest
that I can imagine. The place where you could do the most damage. So, when your counter-
transference arises to such peaks of intensity that such children are often, not only neglected, but
seriously harmed under such conditions, I think that you could handle that. Don’t wait for the
professionals to do it. You can’t wait. Have some sense of trusting yourself. At a certain point, you
do feel worthy. You do feel you have something worthy to offer. You may not be fully matured,
but you have something worthy to offer when you figure out how to do it. Don’t wait until you are
old and famous.

Student: I want to ask a question about ego and egolessness in the context of the discussion of
counter-transference . . .
Ed: We haven’t even used those words yet, have we?
S: I know. It came up for me when you were describing the sending and taking process and it
felt like that was missing in that discussion somehow. What I’m starting to think about is that the
way that we are talking about counter-transference and transference, that those experiences seem

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to arise out of a ground of ego, whereas exchange would arise out of a ground of egolessness. That
might be a little bit too neat, but I wanted to hear your comment on that.
Ed: Well, yes and no. In the sense that if you are giving out, you have this attitude of radiating
and giving up and giving out your health or any feeling of goodness—that is not what ego ordered.
The passion of ego is that it craves pleasure, and you’re giving up pleasure, and you’re giving up
territory. Your own pleasure has a territoriality, which is to say, your ego is on the line. And you
are reminded of it because ego patterns or counter-transference patterns do that. I don’t think we
need to talk psychology to do that. I want to talk about exchange in this case as just the way you
drive a car. Just shift gears—this could be mechanical, earthy. You could do it. It’s not . . . it’s
somehow underneath psychology; this whole thing is almost more primitive than psychology. I
have not wanted to add that psychological/theoretical dimension to the discussion, so that we can
just get into the car and start driving and not to have to think about it too much. But obviously the
whole question of ego psychology and non-ego psychology is at stake in a discussion like this.

Student: I sometimes suffer from the first laziness. Sometimes I get really exhausted and
overwhelmed and drained, and I was wondering how to work with that.
Ed: If you know enough to raise your hand in an audience like this, and pick up the microphone,
and speak into it, you can’t be too much embattled with the first laziness. That is my first thought.
S: Maybe not right now, but . . .
Ed: Well, I guess the first things you need to check in on are:
“Am I really getting enough rest?”
“Do I sleep well enough?”
“Am I eating well enough?” You need to ask that, definitely.
“Am I getting enough exercise?”
“Is my general health good enough to carry on this work?”
And if you answer that positively and if you take steps in that direction, then you have to call a
spade a spade. You have to try harder. Simple as that, I think. Not be overcome. At least to
recognize the tidal wave aspect of it, and how one could get so easily overwhelmed and depressed.
Since you have taken the preliminary steps, all that is required is to just try harder. I don’t have
any psychological answer for it. When it does happen, do you ever succeed in overcoming it, or
are you just laid out by it?

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 S: It’s just that sometimes after I’ve spent a day working with people, I feel totally exhausted
and I feel like just one more thing would break my back, like just one little more atom of pain, or
whatever. And that’s just the way I feel sometimes.
Ed: Yes, well you have to decide whether that’s an illusion or not. Whether that one more thing
or one more taking on of something could really be damaging to your health or whether you should
lean into it further, and think of it as further challenge. But how many people do you see a day?
S: It varies. It’s usually in groups with chronically mentally ill patients.
Ed: Well, you might also look at your schedule. Chögyam Trungpa once said that one could
see sixty people a day, and they would all be the source of your practice and the further energy to
live your life. However, you should be reasonable about how many people that you can truly care
for fully, thoroughly. I mean, some people are capable of having hundreds of wives, for example.
Hundreds, you know. There have been great emperors and world conquerors who joined tribes
and had hundreds of wives, which seems unbelievable to me. So, there’s a limit to how much we
can care for at our stage of the game. Presumably we could stretch our generosity and stretch our
discipline and stretch our patience further and further, but we should be realistic about where we
are and how many people we can actually care for. Don’t play any games with it. So that’s what I
meant by looking at your schedule.
S: Thank you.

Student: In the last couple months, I have had two friends who are well-trained therapists who
are doing the sitting meditation taught here at Naropa.
Ed: What kind of sitting meditation?
S: The same kind that we do here, I mean taught from this lineage. And who are extremely
well-trained therapists. And both of them have been overwhelmed with being open and what
happens to them when they are open in the therapeutic relationship. I mean, both of them have
said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be therapist.” And my feeling is, “Yes, they should.” I think something
happens in our training here that allows that to happen, to be open. And then something else
changes, and you’re not overwhelmed by it. I guess my question is twofold. I am trying to tell them
what our training is here that does that. I’ve been trying to figure it out but since I am not practicing
as a therapist right now, I am not sure I can explain it. But I really trust that our training does
work. So, my question is: what is it that we’ve been taught that lets us keep our center and not be
overwhelmed and yet still be open. How do those people do that who are practicing in this way?

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 Ed: Right. I don’t exactly know the answer to that, but your description of the phenomena, as
far as my experience and a lot of other people’s experience, is absolutely accurate. In fact, we were
just talking about that with the faculty this weekend. I think it was lunchtime. That one can be a
highly skilled, experienced, generous therapist who begins to practice meditation, and is suddenly
overwhelmed. It’s as if their world has turned topsy-turvy. They feel very awkward with doing
therapy. They begin to look at their work very differently than colleagues around them do. They
begin to be almost afraid to make comments about their work. They may lapse into long periods
of silence in their work. They may feel like it’s a period of learning all over again. And then they
reach a point of frustration and then they want to give the whole thing up. They feel that they are
in possible danger of doing more harm than good. That is phase one. This seems to be a ubiquitous
phenomenon: when meditation practice is joined to therapy and meditation comes second. This
seems to be a slightly different path than we were talking about.
When one begins by being a practitioner of meditation and then adds interpersonal practice
on top of that, the sequence of events is somewhat different. We’ve seen this over and over again
literally across the country. One could be both an experienced practitioner and an experienced
therapist, no matter which comes first, but you can’t necessarily join them together. It does take
some kind of catalyst, some sort of cauldron, and supervision with people involved in the same
practice can make the chemical reaction work. What you might say to such a person is: find
supervision with other people who are dealing with the same issues. I think that’s a start. And
perhaps attending, auditing, or whatever, some classes here at Naropa where people are involved
in various stages of putting it together, neuron-wise. We know it does work, and we know if there
is no discussion of it and no intelligence brought to it, one will give up one or the other: be that the
personal or interpersonal practice. That’s happened and continues to happen. That’s why we have
this program in some ways. We created this program because we needed it, then we invited other
people called students to come into it.
S: I keep wanting both of these people to come and do maitri space awareness practice and it
seems like that’s always a piece. It seems like something happens during that time.
Ed: Yes, yes, that would be excellent. Obviously, we have the little jewel box of maitri rooms
right underneath our feet right now. We’ll be offering intensive weekends for therapists. We
appreciate any suggestions about how to go further with that. There are all kinds of possibilities,
so that people don’t feel alone out there doing the dual practices.

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 Student: I’m one of those therapists who got traditional Western training and who’s fairly new
to some of these things, but your comment set something off in my mind about my training and
how, in spite of my keeping up some boundaries, I’ve been able to be somewhat helpful. And I’m
here because I want to be more helpful. But in my training, I think what got me going and what
nurtured me into this, was some very interpersonal exchange between me and the teachers in a
small college, which was very genuine, very open, and was great. But it was just a start. I want to
continue some of that, and I’m involved in a supervision group to do that.
Ed: So, are these people in your group also practicing meditation?
S: Well, they want to do contemplative supervision, but they think they can do it without
meditation.
Ed: Good luck.
S: I’m sitting.
Ed: Good luck. I’ll give you the names of groups in San Francisco, Baltimore, and Chicago that
failed.
S: Yes, I realized that a lot of the therapists that I’ve talked to in the last couple years about
this, about sitting practice and its relationship to therapy, are turned off by it. They think this is
Buddhism or something and they’re still rebelling against Christianity and they don’t want to get
another dogma. And they want to stay in the professionalism thing that you’re talking about. And
I’m working with people like that. It’s kind of tough sometimes. They think one technique is as
good as another.
Ed: The second laziness.
S: Yes. This is helpful I think.
Ed: Yes. I don’t think it’s possible to do the kind of supervision group that you’re seeming to
yearn for unless everybody is sharing both practices. In terms of how to work with our colleagues
who do not practice, we all have that experience one way or the other. Whether it’s students in our
program who are working with their supervisors who don’t practice and who are wary and
suspicious of the training here. Just keep on going further, experience that we are not doing
anything terribly dogmatic or another ism, and stop feeling embarrassed about feeling a lack of
Western training. That we don’t know all of the words and the technology and all the subtleties
and intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of the psychological professional culture. But you are
practicing a discipline that’s two thousand five hundred years old with an exquisitely sophisticated

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psychology of mind and space. It has stood the test of time, and we are still doing it, and it still
works, and we don’t have to be ashamed of that. It’s not another ism; it’s a way of working with
people. That’s all that this thing called Buddhism was at the very beginning, and that’s all it is right
now. It’s a way of working with oneself and preparing oneself to work further with other people. It
is basically the most intensive depth, interpersonal psychology that this planet has ever seen and
you don’t have to apologize. And you don’t have to sell it.

Student: This is sort of an extension of that. Dealing with the third laziness and that duty to
maintain neutrality seems to me to have an aspect of stubbornness that’s almost like a counter-
transference to the client’s stubbornness to maintain their dilemmas.
Ed: Well, there’s a stubbornness of stubbornness, isn’t it? I mean there are really . . . no different
kinds of stubbornness.
S: It just seems to be the same thing being mirrored on either side of the table.
Ed: Stubbornness is traditionally related to by some sense of opening, of educating oneself.
Actually taking a look around. A further awareness of situation. An actual training . . . of education,
literally, at that level. It seems to be the only thing that softens the rock of stubbornness. So,
obviously a lot of patience is involved. What we are talking about is that we also have to be patient
with our own stubbornness, patient with our own counter-transference mirages, and how to work
with them. We can actually use them instead of trying to obliterate them, or erode them, or crack
them with a sledge hammer, or interpret them away (if they could be). That we have to actually
invite them, use them. That’s how we deal with our stubbornness.

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 III.

Meaningful Interpretation

T his is our last section on this topic. I presume that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know if
that’s what people say on termination or not. But it seems like we’re supposed to say
something, which is the moment of interpretation, or the moment immediately preceding
interpretation. One says to oneself, “My goodness, I have to say something now.” From the first
moment of meeting with a client, or the first time they walk through the door, there’s a feeling that
you don’t know who this other person is, and you don’t know who you are in relationship to this
other person, and you don’t know what you’re really supposed to be doing together. But there
comes a point in the session, or in session four or session twelve, where you have to say something.
And it’s interesting how people love interpretations.
I recall very vividly in my own treatment experiences, that is, my being treated, that it
enthralled me when the therapist would actually get it together enough to say something. There
were times where I never heard the first few words. I would just think how delighted I was that I
was being addressed and that he was taking the time to gather things and to try to say something
intelligent to me. His idea was that he would have to say something intelligent to me. My idea was
that he was talking to me at all. I don’t know if that’s what would ordinarily be considered a kind
of narcissistic pleasure. Or a break in the continuum of my endless speech, my endless complaint.
Or whether he actually had something important to say, some real insight, so to speak, which
would be transmitted to me. But in any case, whether the interpretation was useful or not, I found
it endearing. So, we might keep this in mind, that there is just the extension of the effort of the
other person involved, which, irrespective of the content of it, expresses concern. Perhaps it is the
other person’s ability to maybe be foolish, to maybe say something that they are not quite certain
of or confident in. So, there’s some aspect of generosity, one could say, that is very much
appreciated in the offering of an interpretation.

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Balanced Exchange of Both Pain and Intelligence
Now, the idea of what this interpretation is, is open to much question. From the way we’ve been
talking about things this seminar, counter-transference experience is the basis of the possibility of
exchange. But now exchange becomes the basis for the possibility of interpretation.
Before we get into interpretation proper, we should say that this aspect of exchange that I have
discussed so far has been slightly one-sided; that one quality of the panorama of exchange has been
over-emphasized. That quality is obviously pain, predicament, dilemma, anxiety, frustration, and
primitive emotional qualities of all kinds. Certainly, for any proper communication to take place,
that must be tasted, at the very least, tasted by the person who is about to make an interpretation.
But there is another aspect of exchange that is not generally talked about, and that is appreciation
and identification with the other person’s intelligence. It has somewhat to do with the paradigm of
exchange that we’ve talked about, which begins (interestingly enough) with first: radiation of one’s
health, sending; and then following that: accepting ill health, taking. Similarly, there is this dimension
of appreciation of the qualities of another person’s intelligence, experience, and perhaps even
wisdom. And those qualities are highlighted by maitri space awareness practice, as people have
experienced in this specialized psychological training at Naropa. We could say that the foundation
of interpretation—or the foundation of meaningful speech that would actually communicate to
another person a further path quality in their life: something to work with, something to take home,
something to take beyond the hour—has to do with a merger or modulation between one’s
exchange with the other person’s dilemma and suffering and, at the same time, appreciation of
their sharpness and crispness. And when those two come together, or are acknowledged on the
part of the one who is about to interpret, then one has more of the complete picture of what is
possible to communicate.
I want to stress this other dimension of things: that as much as there is contact low, there is
contact high. In other words, as much as we can experience the seed of another person’s pain in
ourselves because we have the same equipment in our human-beingness, we also have the same
equipment to understand and appreciate genuine speech. And whatever intelligence, whatever
wisdom, whatever simple understanding of how things work that person has, they come together
with one’s experience of that person’s pain to make a more complete picture. This is the ground
on which we actually communicate anything.

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 With interpretation, or let’s say communication at this point, there’s a possibility of the simple
acknowledgement of another person’s experience and categories of what has been called
“developmental history of sanity.” I have discussed this throughout and a full presentation is
available in the Naropa Institute Journal of Psychology.20 The categories are:

• The acknowledgment of personal revulsion with habitual patterns of one’s life.

• The desire to transcend a constricted and restricted sense of identity or selfhood.
• The urge for discipline to overcome that.
• The capacity for compassionate action.
• The respect for courageous activity, wherever it is.
• And all of this can happen in an environment of clarity and complete presence.

There are those categories of another person’s intelligence and, in spite of whatever confusion and
whatever ambivalence and whatever predicament they might be faced with, these things are
naturally available. One can appreciate the natural availability of the sanity, of the intrinsic health
in another person.

Varieties of Interpretation
There is a classical view, or what could be called an “orthodox view,” of what interpretation is
supposed to be or what interpretation is supposed to address. All types of interpretation involve,
somehow or other, the obstacles to a fuller, more complete relationship. They include:
interpretations of resistance; interpretations of defense, of how one is holding oneself together;
interpretations of transference, how one holds oneself together by creating a familiar world;
interpretations of what are called constructions, that is, how to link, tie up, past habitual tendencies
with present repetitions of the same; and so on. But in general, interpretations are offered to clarify
the confusion of the moment. All of those seem to have an appropriate place. They seem to have
their own particular kind of usefulness. They are certainly directed toward the issue that there is
something wrong with the other person, and so are slightly limited from that point of view. And
they have also a particular danger.

20. Podvoll, Edward, “The History of Sanity in Contemplative Psychotherapy” 1983. Available at:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d321225feea1100018208e9/t/5dd9ded581fab20e4f1a1b22/15745594562
13/Windhorse-Archives-Naropa-JCPVol2-The-History-of-Sanity-4web.pdf. Also available with a new introduction
in Recovering Sanity 2003, Appendix 2, 353–371.

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 And the danger is that through the power of the words of an interpretation, the interpretation
takes on the power of prescription, then the person that you say such things to is really stuck with
them. They really have to think about them, and really have to make up their mind whether they
believe it or not, and this puts them in certain dilemma of trust at the same time. So, this danger
that we are talking about is that an interpretation of resistance, defense, transference, or a
construction of what happened in the past and how it’s being repeated in the present, has the
possibility of imposing on the other person a view of who they are and a solidification of a sense of
selfhood.
The interpretations that one gives to another person are not really such idle phenomena. We
do them at a certain time, there’s a certain timing to them, and appropriateness to the immediacy
of the situation as it’s happening. They actually get in; whether they are good interpretations or
bad interpretations, so to speak, they are actually being implanted. We have to take some
responsibility for the fact that we might be implanting something in another person that is not
really to their benefit, no matter how correct they might be. There is some discussion among
therapists, and some difficulty among therapists, about what constitutes the most legitimate
interpretation to another person. Some people would define it very strictly, and some people define
it much more broadly. Some people say that any contribution you make in terms of advice or
recommendation to another person is in fact an interpretation. It goes through the same process:
its words can carry the power of prescription, which then implants in the person.
When the faculty for this seminar discussed what we think interpretation is, we came up with
such a tremendous variety of possibilities that we would need to create an encyclopedia of
interpretations which would take us days to review. I would recommend that you reminisce and to
think of an interpretation that has been made to you, a communication that has been made to you,
that you think was of value, that you think was a meaningful statement, and that has stuck and is
still a useful reminder to you. And in a group situation you could go around the room and collect
various examples, and you could see where these examples fall into natural categories. You could
do your own research in this matter. You could do your own collection of data to see what has
been meaningful to yourself and to your colleagues. That is a useful experience to play with.
There are other kinds of interpretations that one hears from people who are in various stages
of recovery from whatever. They say, “This works. Such and such works.” And that they actually
communicate that to their therapists, helpers, or friends, as if to say, “Pass this on. Pass this on.

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 This works. You may not understand this, but this works.” So, we hear a variety of those statements
from people we work with. We should pay close attention to that and do the best we can to actually
translate those or transmit those to people involved in similar types of confusion and trust that there
is some worthwhileness in that. For example, a person that I feel very familiar with, even though
he died one-hundred-fifty years ago, passed on to us an essential part of recovery from acute
confusional reactions. He said in a Victorian language of his time, his mother tongue, he said,
“Please remember, anybody who is in a state of mind like mine, please remember this slogan: keep
your head to your heart and your heart to your head, and if you don’t do that, your head will
wander all day long.”21 Now, I’ve been working with that particular slogan for several years now.
I do not presume to understand the full depth of it, but I do pass it on every chance I get, and it
seems to me that the people that I pass it on to seem to understand it a little better than I do. It has
more meaning to them.

Interpretations Synchronize and Call for Action

The one who offers interpretations might just also be a conduit for some understanding or some
knowledge, and that’s fine. It does point to the fact of interpretation that it could be a situation
where however it is described and however one might creatively phrase the communication, it
seems to be, bottom line, describing a situation where one might be able to synchronize mind and
body. Or, for that matter, speech and mind. Or, for that matter, mind and speech. Or, for that
matter, speech and body. But in any case, this aspect of interpretation has the quality that might
lead one to understand and put into use how to synchronize something or other. From that point
of view, the interpretive communication is one that allows another person to take out of that hour,
out of that meeting, something that they can work with. Something that might be useful. Something
that they could actually, in a technical sense, contemplate, think about, and put into action.
Interpretation always carries a sense of action. One feels the impending interpretation because
one feels, almost atmospherically, a demand to say something. That when one says something,
implied in what one says is a demand that that be actually acted upon, done, used, at least tried
out. So, interpretation always has a sense of activity and action involved. It is not just a flash of
insight. Not just this “Aha! Oh yeah, right on” experience that ends there. Nothing happens except

21. Ed went on to use this quote in Recovering Sanity 2003, 43. —J. Fortuna

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for the shared experience that both people congratulate each other for having understood
something and nothing happens. So, that’s what I mean when I say, “interpretation has a sense of
action.” An interpretation arises out of a demand for action in speech by the therapist. It then gives
rise to a demand for action, as a testing of it, on the part of the other person.
Another aspect of interpretation, again in the broadest sense of the term, is that we are working
with people, whomever they might be: clients, friends, family, who might be consulting us. But on
the other hand, they are working with people: whether it be their clients, their friends, their family,
their children, their students who are in confusion. They are faced with this same demand for
action. The reason they may be talking to us or consulting with us in the first place is that they’re
stuck and they don’t know what to offer to the person whom they might be working with. So,
immediately—and I believe and I practice this—that at the first opportunity when such a situation
arises, then one is no longer (so to speak) a friend, therapist, or whatever, but one becomes, for that
moment, a supervisor in the situation. Just as we have seen in the supervision discussion groups
this weekend, one could immediately become an advisor to such a situation. It might not last more
than a few moments, but it seems to take precedence over everything else that is arising in another
person’s life. Immediately they are a colleague no matter what they were five minutes beforehand.
So, that is still another aspect of interpretation. You become a supervisor to whomever it is.
Another way to look at this issue of meaningful interpretation is with the body, speech, and
mind perspective. In one way or another, we are addressing one of the categories of that complete
description of our being. Body means literally body and environment. The very environment that
one arranges, designs to meet in with another person, and to have a discussion with them is already
a statement. One’s dress is already a statement. I don’t know what it’s a statement of, but it’s
definitely stating something. One might be making definite suggestions about how one could relate
to one’s body and environment, such as the suggestion to someone that they might change
residences. It’s not just an idle interior design recommendation. This comes from an understanding
both of your exchange with the predicament that they might be in with their particular
environment, and the qualities of their appreciation and intelligence for what kind of environment
makes them healthier.
In the same way with speech and relationships, the supervisory experience that I just mentioned is
perhaps the best example of that. In terms of mind, we might remember our experiences with
meditation instruction and we might flash back on “how really does our meditation instructor

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relate to us?” They are concerned with our meditation practice and our obstructions to practice,
our ambitions about practice, our difficulties with doing the technique, and they are somewhat
diagnosing us in that way. They diagnose us from the point of view of the fact that any meditation
instructor, or anybody who has been somewhat experienced with all the obstacles and problems of
meditation, knows what we are talking about. And they may say, “Sit more,” or, “Sit less.” They
might give an interpretation via recommendation, “Sit for only twenty minutes a day.” They may
say, “Stop sitting so much alone. You should sit more in a group situation.” They might say, “Do
a nyinthun, a day-long group meditation session, once a month. See what happens.” They might
say, “Don’t do that dathun, a month-long group meditation intensive, now.” Or whatever. So they
are making recommendations to you about the quality and intensity of how you work with your
mind with meditation. In a sense, there is a paradigm there about how someone might work with
their mind.

Interpretations Clarify Confusion

In general, the issue of interpretation is the issue of how to clarify confusion. Whether that
confusion is, “I don’t know what the next step to take is,” or, “I don’t know how to resolve this
conflict I’m in.” An interpretation could at least clarify the problem of, “On the one hand I could
do this, and on the other hand I could do that.” At least you could clarify conflicting emotions or
ambivalence. At least that is handing over and empowering the other person to make a decision
with full knowledge of what the different possibilities are.
In the end though, as far as I’ve been able to tell, in all the seemingly vast varieties of helpful
communications one could make to another person—the bottom-line interpretation is called “how
the world works,” how things work. Technically speaking, we call this the “laws of karmic cause
and effect.” I will pass on a little anecdote of why this is seemingly so important to me, and why
this seems to be bottom line for any communication. When His Holiness the 16th Karmapa was
visiting Boulder,22 and during the time that he was dying, the health professionals had a group
audience with him. He was obviously in a great deal of pain. The audience had to be kept as brief

22. The 16th Gyalwa Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924–1981) was spiritual leader of the Karma Kagyu
lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He was a primary teacher of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who founded Naropa
University in 1974 and hosted the Karmapa in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974 and 1980. Ed is here referring to the
1980 visit prior to the Karmapa’s death the following year. The Karmapa was known for his vast knowledge of
Buddhism, his deep meditation experience, and especially his wide-open compassion. He was a significant
inspiration to us in the development of contemplative psychotherapy at Naropa University. —J. Fortuna

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and as crisp as possible. And someone asked him, “How do you work with elderly and dying
people?” And he said simply, “The inexorability of karma.” Stop. A few other questions went on,
and then someone who works with children brought up the question, “How do you work with
difficulties in childhood?” And he said, “The inexorability of karma.” Stop. With just about every
question he was asked about how to relate to people, how to work with people, the same answer
kept coming out. So, we took from that a lot of different things. Primarily it was that if you really
help people understand the inexorable linkage of cause and effect and how our minds work and
how the world works—especially when we work with our mind or fail to work with our mind and
the effects of that—then that is giving a tremendous amount to another person. That is imparting
to them some degree of knowledge and understanding that they can work with on their own
without the need for a therapist or other externals supports. That is a tremendous piece of
equipment that you put in the hands of another person. Just the facts of things.

Community, Responsibility, Relaxation

I have only one other way to cut this pie of interpretation. Another three-level logic situation. This
comes from a source that is completely outside of our current Western experience and spiritual
experience of whatever kind. It comes from the recommendations of Dr. Manfred Bleuler in
Zurich. After some forty or fifty years of intimately working with people, he boiled it all down to
three categories of what could conceivably be considered therapeutic communication to another
person, useful communication. He said that communication to another person, if it is to be
considered therapeutic at all, has to have one of the following three marks. The first mark of
therapeutic communication was that the other person should be introduced to a larger social
community. Doing that could be considered a therapeutic possibility. The second mark is that the
person’s individual responsibility is increased. The third mark is that the communication might
relax the other person. I think these are interesting guidelines, or checkpoints, to see how our own
communications to other people, particularly to people in need, fit with these: introduction to
larger social community, increasing their individual sense of responsibility, and relaxing them from
struggle.
The great variety of possibilities of making therapeutic, helpful communications to people
leaves a lot of openness in the situation. There are a lot of possibilities to draw upon, and, at the
same time, there are some checkpoints. I think this is all I have to pass on about this. This is the

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best that I’ve heard. And really, that’s all that an interpretation really is—just passing on the best
you’ve heard. The best you’ve understood. What you’ve seen to be workable in your life. And the
other person can take it or leave it.

Student: I have a question about the possibility of supervising a relationship with another person
in the patient’s life. Can that extend to guiding that person in the relationship with the therapist,
which is somewhat in the realm of, so called, self-disclosure? In other words, could you advise a
person about where you might be coming from so that they would know how to work with you?
Ed: If somebody comes to you and says, “I just don’t know what to do with you anymore.” Is
that . . . ?
S: Yes. You know something is happening with yourself.
Ed: Well, suddenly you’re their supervisor. You’re both their patient and the supervisor at the
same time. Is that what you mean?
S: No, no. I am asking if you could supervise the relationship the patient has with yourself by,
for instance, providing information about where you’re—
Ed: Oh, you’re talking about me? You’re talking about me, in particular, right?
S: Actually, I was thinking of myself.
Ed: Well, I mean if somebody says, “I just can’t stand it anymore. I don’t know what to do with
you. I’m at my wits end. I would really like to help you in some way, but I’m sick and tired of
guessing and second-guessing you and I can’t go on like this!” I mean, how many times have we
heard that? I suppose you could sit down suddenly very quietly and say, “What do you need to
know, in order to have . . .” You know, “What do you need to know?” It’s as if, somehow, just
handing over the role of therapist, generically speaking, to the other person and becoming a proper
patient. It is possible to become a very proper patient where communication occurs quickly, very
smoothly, if one person is able to become the excellent patient and hand over the role of therapist
and completely open to the communication of the other person. It may last for five minutes, but it
seems the relationship is electric at that time. It means how to immediately stop whatever
professional activity you are doing and become a good patient. A lot of traditional societies give
instructions on how to become a good patient, how to make a proper offering, how to pay proper
respect, and how to end the thing properly and go on about your business. It could happen in
moments. I mean, it’s just total confusion . . . confusion . . . it’s just total fluidity between healer
and patient, because it could change at any moment, as any ordinary relationship can.

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 Student: When you say, “Anything could change in a moment?” What do you mean? Just now,
when you said that.
Ed: In a moment. The patient is saying, “I don’t know how to relate to you anymore. You seem
really closed. You’re really bound up. You have all these preconceptions about me. Every move I
make, you have this diagnosis for. Every time I try to do something, you point out the resistance to
me. You know, I’m claustrophobic in that. I think you have a problem.” Then if you could
immediately become the patient at that moment. You could acknowledge that. It’s not as if you’re
faking it. Somebody has told you a diagnosis. At least within that little room, that little diagnosis of
your relationship, that has to be true. So, immediately you become the patient and find out more
about it so that you can continue.
S: At that moment, it’s the therapist dropping his or her role, or whatever they’re in, and
becoming . . . . It’s funny, when you said, patient, I thought of really just becoming a human being,
so it’s one human being to the other. It wakes you up to what had been going on or is in the
moment. Okay, that’s the first point. The second point that I had difficulty with was when you
talked about the illness of the therapist and our willingness to see patients. I think what I heard was
we should try to work unless our illness is infectious. From my experience, what I have found is
that I need to be mindful in terms of seeing what the situation is. That there are certain situations
that my coming into work feeling really sick has not been helpful, and other times it’s been okay.
In other words, it’s not quite that black and white. I just wanted to put that out in terms of my own
work. Now part of that may be that I see people maybe once a week rather than intensively three
or four times a week. There’s something about using good judgment about that that has seemed
important to me.
Ed: Yes, that’s true. The first recommendation about the issue of effort and energy and proper
use of energy is how to take a break. Personally speaking, I never start an hour on a full bladder. I
always go to the bathroom before I see a patient. So, I do take care of myself.
S: Good.
Ed: But, when I have a question in my mind about, “Should I go to work today, or should I
stay in bed and take it easy?” And then a moment of deliberating about that first thing in the
morning, “Should I cancel everything?” I generally try to go to work only because I learn so much
from that, which is what I was trying to say yesterday. It becomes an extremely intense day, when I
do that. I mean, I was just hoping people could experiment with that rather than think, “I can’t

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work today.” Or, “I have to work today.” Keep that in mind as a personal experiment, working
when sick and working when healthy. Personally, when I feel extremely healthy and terribly robust,
I’m really overriding the patient a lot with a kind of manic therapeutic energy.

Student: I have a question about your answer to the question before, which is, “good patient,
good therapist, good communication,” which implies a kind of hierarchical situation, and how that
applies to an ordinary relationship. Is it then good human being, good human being, good
communication, and how both of those situations relate to the term intimacy.
Ed: Yes. When you go to a restaurant and the waiter or waitress is trying to put a plate of food
in front of you, you make room for that. You don’t necessarily just hold your seat and demand,
force them, to move around you when you’re talking to somebody else. You acknowledge that
somebody’s attending you there. It might just be the very slightest bodily movement to allow them
to get a plate in. You’re being served. You allow yourself to be served properly and not interfere
with the server. I think that occurs constantly, whatever we do. There are some proper roles, some
hierarchy so to speak, lasting maybe for a moment, so that you don’t obstruct what the other person
is trying to serve you.
S: That seems fairly clear. My question is about a relationship, which is not, formal in the sense
of therapist/patient, but between any two human beings such as a marriage.
Ed: Oh, that’s the question, of marriage?
S: What’s the difference?
Ed: I’ll have to let you know about that. Sometimes the other person needs help, and sometimes
you need help. Sometimes it’s purely secretarial, and sometimes it’s really physical help with the
house. Sometimes somebody knows how to clean a bathroom better than you do and you say,
“What should I do now?” I mean, it seems constant. Every time you have a cleaning situation in
the household, somebody’s the crew chief. Maybe just for that particular room somebody knows
how to do it. Somebody’s foreman, forewoman. Do you know what I mean? It seems to be a
constant level of movement and adaptation to whoever knows more in that very particular
situation. To adapt to it requires real dissolving of territory all the time.

Student: How do we work with karma, with the law of cause and effect in our daily lives and
especially as therapists? I seem to constantly cycle through a process of remembering this and
forgetting this. How do I deal with this?

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 Ed: Yes, keep trying to remember this. Over and over and over again. I mean this is the fact of
the situation. The karmic process happens a lot more quickly than we want to acknowledge. Time
is precious, as we have been hearing all the time. Our ability to function and be useful and make
some sense and some meaningfulness out of this flash in the pan called “my life” is sitting right
here. I mean we have to learn how to work it. We make mistakes and then we have to clean up
after the mistakes. It’s cause and effect. And if we do interesting, useful things with people,
sometime or other they might write thank you notes, but don’t expect them. But in any case, the
virtuous actions seem to, in the long run, open up possibilities for meaningfulness to us. So, I mean
it’s really simple in the framework of cause and effect—that we get what we pay for. Do you get
married? You might get divorced. If you don’t handle the relationship correctly, then you get
divorced. And then there’s all the rest that comes along with that. There’s child support, there’s
alimony—guilt permeates the whole thing. You know. It’s not any mysterious thing. Everybody
knows what happens when you do one thing, what the consequences are that follow from it. It’s
simple how things work, and they happen moment by moment that way. If your posture is
absolutely miserable, it’s a pretty good bet that one can’t handle one’s mind correctly in such a
situation. So, it’s simple, simple things. People forget that.

Student: You know, I was just amazed by Dr. Bleuler’s three marks in relation with traditional
healing ceremonies. It looks to me like they must be causally linked. If you look at the Navajo
chantways, the blessingway, or holyway, or all of those various five-night, nine-night ceremonials.
The first thing that’s done, or what’s done all throughout those ceremonies, is the calling of and
putting a person in larger social relationships, or universal relationships, and calling the four
directions. Calling the environment into contact with that particular patient.
Ed: You’re talking about the gathering of the healing community.
S: Yes, and the larger community of the environment of all the elements in the Navajo
landscape. And then the enormous responsibility of the patient for the ceremony itself: how much
preparation it takes, how much money it takes, how much calling together a family’s resources of
what have you. And it seems that through that process of linking self with the larger environment
that the relaxation occurs from this notion of right relations. It’s a type or quality of relaxation. I
don’t know what you’d have to say about that sense of right relations, but it seems like when an
interpretation is correct or on target, that you could actually feel in another person a kind of letting
go of burden. I wonder what you would have to say further about the nature of relaxation.

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 Ed: How interpretation could relax someone. Well, there are all kinds of examples. Again, in
discussion group, when we were going around saying what our favorite interpretation was, a lot of
them seemed to be an immediate sense of relaxation that you are just not as stuck as you thought
you were. They seemed to have that response quality of relaxation. But Bleuler is not talking about
interpretations as such, but about any therapeutic intervention that could bring relaxation. An
example of which might be, “I think you should have someone stay at your house tonight, and not
be alone. Stop.” That could be a relaxing intervention, along with expanding one’s social
community. So, it’s not that it has to be one or the other, but a therapeutic intervention could
include all three marks at the same time. But it definitely has to have one of them. You could give
the medication as a sense of relaxation if that was exactly its intention, if that were the intention.
And if you did it as long as it were needed and no longer, medication would be sometimes
extremely useful and appropriate. Social community could be anything from a healing group in
the most traditional sense, to gathering the family together at the moment of crisis. Or it could be
a work community.
S: It seems like this environmental aspect goes beyond other people, but really right relations
with environment, with the body as environment.
Ed: An environmental aspect of therapeutic intervention—what we believe in this particular
psychological training program, almost foremost in our repertoire of possible therapeutic
interventions—is how to relate to environmental influences that have healing capabilities. In a
sense that is one of the strongest aspects of what we call contemplative psychotherapy, is that we
know the principles of how to work from the outside in. How to tame mind by arranging furniture
correctly. So that’s a very important point for us.

Student: This is a question about interpretation and counter-transference. When we were talking
about interpretation, I was thinking of just what is happening when I am in a room with a client
and they’re talking, and not particularly asking me anything directly, but just talking. And then at
some point, some impulse somewhere comes up for me to say something to them. And from my
own particular discipline, that usually takes the form of asking a question. But sometimes, what
arises is some idea of an interpretation in that I have an urge to explain something to them about
themselves. And I found, particularly in terms of the result being relaxation, that isn’t always the
case. I look at that type of intervention in retrospect, and sometimes I will see there was impatience
on my part, or aggression on my part, or just a desire to talk to enter the system, of communication,

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something like that. And I’m wondering if you can say something about developing the discipline
involved in working with the impulse that comes up to say something. Particularly the impulse to
say something to the person about the person, and how you develop a discipline so that that might
in fact be therapeutic rather than random.
Ed: On the one hand, I don’t think we need to be afraid of small talk with patients. They might
think, well, we’re wasting their time, and they don’t want to be involved with chitchat with us when
the clock is ticking. But I think you should be completely free to be involved with small talk. I think
that is where a lot of the issues of burnout come in, because you subtly move into the situation of
professionalism, which means, “Whatever I say has to be accurate, useful, thoroughly
communicative,” and so on. And under tremendous strain. I remember a second-year student
recently saying, “I can’t stand this anymore. I just want to have a natural conversation.” You
should be absolutely free to have a natural conversation. Frankly I think interpretations, in the
stricter sense of the term, should be made rarely. If I make one in an hour, it’s a lot. I never do it
unless it is being called for, then I have to do it. Somehow that environmental sense of demand
that I do it is the tip off and, even then, I don’t always do it. So, interpretation is sort of a rare thing,
and paid more attention to in that way. On the other hand, I’m completely free with advice. I tell
people what movies I think they should see or how they should arrange their furniture, and
whatever. But interpretation, I have to be really careful. It has to be sort of called out of me, I feel.
Otherwise, I engage in small talk, because that small talk is the most interesting information about
another person. It’s when you’re not being a professional therapist and they’re not being a
professional patient. And then somehow, out of that, a great deal more truthfulness arises.

Somehow, just the very act of our joining our practice together and studying together at the
same time seems to be powerful. In the same way as working with people who practice meditation
is very different from working with people in other situations. Sometimes you’re working with
someone and they begin meditation practice for one day beforehand, and the difference in the
level and possibility of communication is immediately obvious. I don’t know what other people’s
experience is, but this is mine. Just so in any teaching situation that if we are practicing and
communicating together, communication is much quicker and much more accurate. I would love
to encourage you and myself to keep practicing. Meetings together will be that much more
effective. It can require a tremendous environment to do something seemingly simple together; we
would have no teaching situation without this sense of environment of relationships.

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The Psychology of
Birth and Death

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 Introduction to “The Psychology of Birth and Death”
Jeffrey Fortuna

I would like to thank you, reader, for devoting your time and attention to studying the final
seminar of this three-seminar collection: “The Psychology of Birth and Death.” I was present
at this seminar, both as a student and as a dialogue partner with Ed as he prepared for and then
taught the weekend. I recall him taking this particular seminar very seriously, and his preparation
was extensive. The seminar he gave was based on a course he developed in the early 1980s at the
Naropa University as an in-depth study of the psychology of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and its
relevance to psychotherapy. By 1983, he asked me to take over teaching this course, which enabled
me to experience firsthand how challenging, both personally and intellectually, this material can
be.
This may be the most difficult of the three seminars to follow and integrate into one’s existing
cognitive framework. Here, Ed presents two overlapping sets of six patterns: six realms and six
bardos. This material can be disruptive to our conventional cognitive systems. It may be less
familiar than Ed’s presentations about the psychotherapy relationship and awareness of dreams.
We may also be limited by cultural stereotypes of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as merely related to
the psychedelic experience or what happens after death. Ed is unique in approaching this material
from the perspective of a physician-healer rather than from a purely scholarly or Buddhist point of
view. This perspective makes the intention to serve the human transmission of sanity with people
in extreme states even more urgent. With this seminar, it occurs to me that we have yet another
variation on the theme of Ed’s dedication to parables. For me, the text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead
is itself the parable or teaching story. As Ed explains in the seminar, this teaching was left to us
from long ago as distilled insights from the meditation experience of master practitioners of India
and Tibet. One can regard this text as a first-person dimension of the clinical phenomena of birth
and death that one can personally resonate and exchange with. Ed does his best to help us bridge
to this text, which can otherwise seem esoteric and inaccessible.
With great appreciation for Ed’s pioneering development of this material for health and
healing, I welcome you to this seminar. After his death in 2003, Ed left behind his lecture notes on
this seminar. Just below the title heading of his notes, he quotes the following aspiration prayer:

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 When parted from beloved friends, wandering alone,
my own projections’ empty forms appear,
may the buddhas send out the power of their compassion
so that the bardo’s terrors do not come.

This is the second stanza of “The Bardo Prayer which Protects from Fear” in The Tibetan Book
of the Dead,23 and it touches on themes central to Ed’s life’s work: the desolate experiences of
“wandering alone” in realms of mental illness. Such experiences leave one vulnerable to mind’s
projections disowned and returning with a vengeance, which can lead to the terror of nightmare.
In such terror one may be especially open to the possibility of a benevolent presence that can bridge
loneliness, and show how to awaken from the nightmare, and access inborn intelligence. This
stanza captures Ed’s endless curiosity about the human mind and his compassion for suffering
people that formed his intention for teaching this seminar.
It is now thirty-three years since this seminar. I am an older person still studying these teachings
and sharing them with others. The material still gets under my skin and works on me. Just
yesterday, I had an unsettling bardo experience in the midst of working on this introduction. Here
is the story.
In the second session of this seminar, Ed makes a detailed presentation of the “six realms.” As
he is about to begin this section he comments on the common experience of dread as one is about
to enter study of the realms. He personally knew very well of such dread and resistance, and how
comforting it was to keep such study on an intellectual level. Why would he dread talking about
the realms? I witnessed first-hand that when presenting these realms, Ed would enter and fully
embody each realm to describe it from the inside out. The thick, confused, all-encompassing
quality of a realm was hard on both him and the audience. He felt the nausea of forever going
around and around the realm cycle. His description of dread and resistance to approaching the
realms became a thorn under my mind-skin.
Then I realized how rarely realm psychology is mentioned or even thought about by any of my
colleagues in modern-day therapy work. I had the sudden cutting suspicion that this seminar is
only relevant to me, and that no one else really cares about this anymore. My confidence in the
worthiness of keeping this alive drained from me. I despaired that I was only holding onto a long-

23. Ed is referring to page 103 of Tibetan Book of the Dead 1975, translated and with commentary by Francesca
Freemantle and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. —J. Fortuna

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gone friendship with Ed and a has-been experience out of nostalgia, which keeps my grief for such
loss far away. This despair grew on an older fear that Ed once shared with me: that he and his life’s
work would end up as an anachronism. He and I would end up as has-beens, rehashing old stories
while everyone else had moved on. I have also had such flickers of doubt about my own relevance
as I age in a modern world of seemingly sophisticated psychotherapies. These fears are, in turn,
layered upon my personal dread of my own death. Then, in that night’s sleep, I was haunted by
dreams of grimly going through the motions of mechanical, heartless “make-work,” and
occasionally being handed a check as payment, for nothing. In the dream, I felt my work was all
lifeless pretense, yet I was trapped in it. I awoke with a desolate, sad feeling. Later in the morning,
I opened the Tibetan Book of the Dead and read from Chögyam Trungpa’s compelling text. It inspired
me all over again with an urgent sense of the teaching’s profound significance and that I must let
others know of its importance . . . but I still had doubts.
And there I found myself: at a peak point of uncertainty. Was I really gaining ground with my
understanding and urge to tell others of the power of this seminar, or was I falling through the floor
of disgust at my own self-deception in thinking that this material is at all relevant anymore? This
was what Ed calls a “crisis point.” At that moment, I simply recognized I was at such a peak point
in the bardo. I remembered the instruction to simply relax, to observe what would happen next,
and to open up to a larger space. I recalled Chögyam Trungpa’s words that I had just read:

The book is not based on death as such, but on a completely different concept of death. It is a
“Book of Space.” Space contains birth and death; space creates the environment in which to
behave, breathe, and act; it is the fundamental environment which provides the inspiration for
this book. (Tibetan Book of the Dead 1975, 1)

I then opened up to a larger time. I realized that these bardo teachings have survived and been
relevant for fourteen hundred years; they can readily survive another generation or two, with or
without my stumbling efforts. I recognized what seemed to be co-existing vertiginous forces in me
of the undertow of fear-depression and the upward pull of hope-excitement. That awareness
presented a choice point to me in that moment. I realized that even an ordinary student like me
can tolerate the intensity of the peak point of uncertainty and remain grounded in the no-man’s
land of the in-between. Even now, I remain uncertain, but I do know that these teachings get under
my skin because they are accurate to how my mind works. Our aspiration is that these teachings
help clarify your mind to you, as well as clarify the minds of people and communities in your care.

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Then you can come to your own conclusions about whether this material is worth keeping,
practicing, and sharing.
We are fortunate to have a surprisingly robust literature of published material for such an
arcane area of study, composed by venerable Tibetan teachers and modern Western practitioners.
The following is a partial, annotated list of texts that are of special relevance to Ed’s approach to
the topic:

1. For this seminar, Ed relied primarily on the Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through
Hearing, a translation with commentary by Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Freemantle (1975).
He also directly based this seminar on Chögyam Trungpa’s Transcending Madness (1992), which
thoroughly explains the relationship between the six bardos and six realms.
2. The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa (2004) has a lengthy introduction to volume six that
explains the history of Chögyam Trungpa’s development of this material.
3. “Attitude Toward Death in the Healer-Patient Relationship,” by Chögyam Trungpa, in
The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology (2005), directly addresses the healing
relevance of death.
4. Francesca Freemantle worked closely with Chögyam Trungpa for many years. Her
comprehensive book, Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead (2003), makes
his original teaching more accessible to a Western audience.
5. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey through the Bardos of Living
and Dying (2019) is a remarkable account of his three-year wandering retreat as a homeless beggar,
sharing his direct experience of the bardos.
6. Judy Lief has written a useful and clear book, Making Friends with Death: A Buddhist Guide to
Encountering Mortality (2001). Lief, regarded by many of us as a living master of the bardo tradition,
is a senior teacher of Chögyam Trungpa’s lineage and was a close friend and colleague of Ed.
7. Secret of the Vajra World by Reginald Ray (2001) has a chapter titled “Lessons in Mortality:
Death and Dying in Tantric Practice” that provides yet another lucid explanation of this material.
Dr. Ray was a close colleague and friend of Ed and continues the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa.
8. Samuel Bercholz, the founder of Shambhala Publications and a student of Chögyam
Trungpa, has written a personal narrative, A Guided Tour of Hell: A Graphic Memoir (2016). This is a
gripping account of the author’s near-death experience of the realms.

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 9. Andrew Holecek is known for his lucid and accessible teaching on death and dying. He has
written Preparing to Die: Practice Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition (2013).
10. Mind Beyond Death by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (2006) masterfully illuminates these
esoteric Tibetan teachings in simple and clear language.
11. The Mirror of Mindfulness (1989) is a practical guidebook on the bardo teachings, written by
Tsele Natsok Rangdrol in Tibet in the 1600s, and translated by Eric Pema Kunsang. This classic
text gives one a feeling for the deep history of this material and the generations of meditators who
continue to practice in this tradition.
12. The Bardo Guidebook by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche (1991) is based on extensive teaching the
author gave in 1987 as commentary on The Mirror of Mindfulness.
13. The Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy has several articles relevant to this material. They
were published by Naropa University and are available at www.windhorseguild.org/legacy-
project.
a. Vol. I: “Working With the Old and Dying” by Ann Cason and Victoria Thompson.
b. Vol. III: “Attentive Care: Working with the Dying Patient” by Judith Lief.
c. Vol. IX: “Befriending Old Age and Death” by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.
14. A Sacred Compass: Navigating Life Through the Bardo Teachings (2020) by Anam Thubten is an
accessible and direct presentation on the subject.

October 2019
Boulder, Colorado

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 I.
The Bardo Experience

I t is hard to learn about this material—nobody wants to hear about it. You do and you don’t
because it is about what is happening, and what is happening is not always that exhilarating.
We are talking about the facts of life, which include the facts of death. To get from here to there
includes the process of dying, which is ordinarily considered a rather morbid subject, depending
on our belief system about what is going to happen to us. So, from that point of view, what is going
to happen to us is put off into the future with the idea that we don’t need to worry about that too
much. You young people may feel that this does not concern you all that much. On the other
hand, what I will be presenting is that what we have put off for our future old age is not quite that
far off. The particular kind of teachings that I will be talking about are based on the core idea that
the process of dying and our own death are happening continuously.

Death Happens Continually

Generally speaking, there are two extremes for thinking about our death. They are both very
obvious and we all have entertained both of them. One is the extreme view called nihilism. We
think, “What’s the big deal about the whole thing? When I die, it will be like a candle snuffed out
and I’ll go to some kind of eternal rest, sleep. It will probably be better than the way I sleep these
days. There will be no waking up at three o’clock in the morning and wandering about the house.
It will be eternal sleep: gracious, soft, pink maybe, cushioned, uninterrupted, blissful, no problem,
no worry.” The opposing extreme view, eternalism, is the belief that we will not merely rest peacefully
in the bosom of our unconsciousness, but rather, that we will continue and have another shot at
this whole thing. That what we have done so far is not a complete waste, but we have learned
something from it. We have been through something; we have actually lived through things. By
the end of our lives, we hope we will have learned a great deal more than we know now and we
will be able, somehow or other, to carry that on. That the project we are involved with will not be
that interrupted, really. That the wisdom we have learned, understood, will not be wasted—it will
continue. We will fight through.
But I am talking about a different view of things than the extremes of nihilism and eternalism.
And the teachings that I am trying to present here are somewhat too difficult for all of us: they are

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teachings that describe for us the process of dying and the dissolution of the body in eight
consecutive stages. Then, at the moment of death, there are teachings about the flaring, blazing of
our consciousness—a swan song, you could say. After that, there are visions that occur. Then after
that, there is the phenomenon of our trying to get back, to re-form, to re-embody. And each step
on the way of this process has consequences in terms of what will happen to us. Where we will
wind up. Where we will land. It is said in the teachings that we are extremely fortunate to be able
to hear such teachings, to have a human body and mind that is unobstructed and reasonably clear
enough to be able to understand something. And, at the same time, we are taking a very great risk in
all of this. We might not be here again to do this, to hear anything. We may just remain involved
in beliefs of eternal sleep or eternal “same-thing,” or eternal “belief in ourselves.”
There are innumerable theories, conjectures, and scenarios about what happens when we die
and after we die. Just about every culture on the face of the planet has speculated about this. And
there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe any of them. They are hearsay, someone else’s
opinion, someone else’s theory, and we can’t really believe any of it. So, let’s get down into what
we can believe, what we can witness, right now. That is: a quality of the teachings about the Tibetan
Book of the Dead and about death, the moment of death, and the moments after death, that have
been handed down to us. What can we believe right now?
We have a human body. No argument. This body wears down. No argument. As it wears
down, it becomes plagued with illnesses of seemingly infinite variety and combination. This body
then dies, or seems to approach death, in any case. That is a definite experience that we know
about, we can vouch for. We can see and watch people go through this. They die. It is a big jolt
that is a juncture for this body-mind complex. It is a juncture and a jolt. Everyone who goes
through it says it is a jolt. They don’t say it after the fact—we aren’t speaking of the beyond; we
aren’t talking about speaking with dead people—we are speaking of people in the process of dying.
We watch them die, we stay with them, we hold their hands, we take their pulse, we clean the sweat
from their foreheads, we comb back their hair, we straighten their bed, we clean their feces from
their bottom, we give them a sip of water, and we watch them die. And they say, during this time,
“It is a big jolt.” They say, “I never expected this.” And you think to yourself, “What do you mean
you never expected this? Everybody knows you’re born, you live, you die. What do you mean you
never expected this?” Because there seems to be something going on at that moment that, in fact,

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they never expected. That is a maximum possible error that they had made.24 They never thought
it would come to this.
What is it that they never thought they would come to, other than the intellectual
understanding that they would have to leave this planet, so to speak, someday? They say, or they
imply at the time of their dying, that very important things are happening. We’ve heard all kinds
of stories about people drowning, dying, and they say life flashes before their eyes. Right? In a sense
that’s corny, but on the other hand, something like that seems to happen during the process of
dying. The quality of memory is sharpened, is very quick. Everything could be remembered in a
moment, and, at the same time, there is a condensation of memory where they could review life in
a moment and see something. They see something they wish they had always seen before. That is:
how brief and fleeting, like a shooting star, this human life is. And you don’t have to be dying to
see that. Elderly people will say that. They will say, at the last moment, “It seems like just yesterday
morning I was a child.” There is a moment of understanding of brevity, fleetingness. The
traditional metaphor is that life is like an arrow shot toward a target that cannot be interrupted. It
is very quick and once it sticks, it is done for.
That will happen to everyone here and to everyone that we know. The same old thing will
happen again. There is no intent here, whatsoever, to scare anybody, to make anybody heavy, or
to make anybody worried—that is just the way it happens. In the fall season, you look out your
window and see grass dying, flowers wilting, and trees turning colors. At some point, the trees will
turn black, but we may not notice that because the leaves will fall and then it is over. By then we
will be too concerned with survival through the winter to notice that everything has changed. Every
human being grows up with this knowledge and it is somewhat subconscious. Every child knows
that the leaves are turning now, that growth has stopped. That is why there are so many theories,
so many myths, and so many symbols about the process of dying in traditional cultures. And that
is why there have always been a variety of different kinds of practices in different cultures, because
traditional cultures have related to seasons and have related to the elements. Every child in
Calcutta and Bombay knows more about the process of death than we do because they see it on
the streets every day.

24. This is a reference to “MAX POSS ERROR,” a term Donald Crowhurst used to describe a moment of confused
anguish. Ed re-uses this term to describe the middle phase of Crowhurst’s psychotic predicament: the shock of
maximal groundlessness (insecurity) resulting from a personal failure of judgement (Recovering Sanity 2003, 115). —
J. Fortuna

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 I am talking about dying, death, and the possibilities afterward—and this seems very esoteric.
At Naropa, where I teach, we have seemingly been accused of teaching esoteric psychology. But
what we are trying to do, in fact, is just to teach the facts of life, as has always been done. There is
nothing esoteric about it. However, the teachings that we have inherited and that are presented in
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing address a quality that is esoteric. It is
“esoteric” in the sense of being private, personal, confidential, and secret. These teachings are very
private and confidential because to understand them, one has to seemingly look deep inside oneself,
into one’s own experience—that is the “privacy.” They are “confidential” because looking inside
that way, it is extremely difficult to communicate beyond oneself to another. Finally, they are
“secret” because what is going on in the process of dying is only known to us, only known to the
person going through it. This is said to be excruciatingly lonely.
In order to have one’s wits about one during this loneliness, one should train in loneliness before
all that happens. Before you hit the brick wall at one hundred and eighty miles an hour, you should
have some experience with loneliness. That is where the practice of meditation comes in, which is
the ultimate experience with loneliness. No matter how much you try to manufacture the possibility
that someone is listening to you—that your meditation instructor will hear everything you have to
say, or the person next to you is going through the same thing—forget it. You know that is not
happening. We train to die by practicing being alone and getting close to our own bones, which
we will have to do in any case whether we train or don’t train. There will be a moment of dying
when we will be utterly alone and we will have experiences. Let’s look at those experiences.

The Meaning of Bardo

The experience that we would like to focus on is known as “the bardo.” There is a basic formula
or prototype of this bardo experience, but before we get to that, we should say what this esoteric
word means. In a variety of translations, bardo means “the in-between state,” meaning that which
is between here and there. Or, in other words, that which is nowhere. Another literal translation
is “no man’s land,” meaning a state of existence that no one can claim, no one can put a banner
on. No one can say, “I understand it.” No one can say, “I get it.” It is beyond that kind of
conceptualization. A traditional metaphor for it is an island in the middle of a river. The island
stands as something of a high point beyond the continuously flowing river. But the whole bardo,

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the meaning of the bardo, is that there is no island separate from the river; you cannot think about
the island separate without its background of the river.
Another way to express this, which is very much a part of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is that the
teachings about dying are basically the teachings about space. But what is “space”? Saying that
does not help us much. Space is just as difficult as bardo to understand. Many people at Naropa have
been involved in space awareness practice. We don’t teach space awareness practice for nothing;
that phrase—space awareness practice—doesn’t come out of nowhere. We teach about the element of
space. We all have basic familiarity with the elements of earth, water, fire, and wind or air. Now
we are talking about the element of space. It is just as real, concrete, and powerful as any of the
other elements. So Naropa’s psychology program has been teaching about the element of space
and how to relate to it directly. There do not seem to be many ways to do it. Earth, water, fire, and
air are simple. We teach the space awareness program, maitri space awareness program, and we
go through a kind of a training where, in a variety of aspects, space is closed in, colored, lighted,
and absolutely intensified, and then let go of, so that one can understand intensified space and
relaxed space. In that way we can begin a journey of relationship to this element of space. So it is
said that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a book about space. The river is the space, in a way. The
river is what is really going on around us, the total environment. And the island is a peak point, a
sudden eruption, an intensification, of that space. So, in order to experience the bardo situation
properly, we have to experience the space in which bardo takes place.

The Six Bardos

Traditionally speaking, there are six kinds of bardo. There is the bardo of life, the interlude in which
we are currently in. All of us are now involved in the passage, the interval, the interlude, between
birth and death. This bardo is the shooting star of our life. Within that bardo, there is the bardo of
dream, which is the experience that takes place while the physical body is sleeping, motionless, and
inactive. This bardo is all the mental phenomena that occur during the lifetimes and lifetimes that
we live in dream land. Also within the bardo of life is the bardo of meditation, which includes all the
experiences in meditation. Once we have the intention to meditate, to just be with ourselves,
experiences happen there. The bardo of meditation is anything that happens there, from the most
one-pointed concentration to the most mindless flakiness. The fourth bardo is the moment of death.
The next bardo is the moment after death, called the bardo of luminosity, or dharmata. The sixth bardo is

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the bardo of becoming, which is how we “re-birth,” so to speak. Not how we reincarnate—that is too
much like the notion of eternal self-hood—but how we “re-birth”: how we take form. Waking up
from a dream, we go through a period of no man’s land once again.
The conventional observation of things is that we go to sleep and have a dream and the alarm
clock rings and we are up and at it. But the fact is that the process of coming out of a dream and
into waking up to the point where you have the wherewithal to turn off the alarm clock has a series
of stages that are all quite discernable and quite remarkable because they are the reverse of falling
asleep and they are the reverse of dying. They are the same stages as those of taking form after
dying, though to a lesser degree of intensity.

Observing Bardo
The sense of bardo, the interlude, the passing between here and there, the juncture, is happening in
many different aspects of life, but it takes quite a degree of precision to see it, to spot it, to track it
down. We are all at different levels of capabilities of observation and have different training about
doing such a thing. There are some people who are in such confused states of mind that they
cannot tell the passage from day to night. We pride ourselves on being able to do that. We know
day from night. There are some people who couldn’t tell when an hour is up. Others just intuitively
know when an hour is up. Because of their bodily habits, or because of meditation, they know just
when about twenty minutes has gone by because there are signs in their body—in their right knee,
or something like that. There are all different kinds of capabilities in seeing transitional points. So,
in terms of the several different stages of when a dream collapses, evaporates, to the point where
you say, “I am fully conscious and turning off my alarm clock,” there are somewhere between six
and eight stages of consciousness that are clearly demarcated to some people because they have
trained at that level of high-tech psychology. What we are talking about is not esoteric psychology;
we are talking about high-tech psychology.
The point of studying dying and death is because that bardo experience happens only once in
this given lifetime for us. We will have one experience of that—that is it. We will have many
experiences of the other bardos. If one extends the notion of bardo as interlude, gap, no man’s
land, nowhere to the rest of our experience—it has actually been said to be the gap between one
conscious thought and the next. We can track that. The bardo experience happens at that moment.
But it is very subtle and very difficult to see, so we might look at the bardo of the moment of death,

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literal death, as the prototype because it is very extreme. It is slowed, making it very possible to
understand what is happening, even for people like us. The basic pattern of the bardo experience
is gap—which is said to be happening all the time, moment to moment. If we had the wherewithal,
we would see the basic prototype, but we don’t. Yet, we can keep our eyes open. If there is anything
my words here are supposed to do, it is to remind us to keep our eyes open and be aware of the
possibilities of bardo as gap and the phenomena that happen within that gap in every aspect of our
life.

Preparing for the Bardo of Death

The bardo is part of our basic psychological makeup. We were born with it, we live with the
experience, and we die with it, in spades. At the moment, we are talking about the “spades.” At
the time of death and dying—and dying people report this to us—the earth element dissolves into
the element of water, water dissolves into the element of fire, fire dissolves into the element of air
or wind, and air dissolves into the element of space. There is nothing terribly shocking about that.
We know our bodies are made of exactly those elements. Just like everything else on this planet,
we are composed of the earth element—bone, teeth, nails—and the earth element comprises those.
We are made up of fifty to sixty percent water. We are also made up of heat. We are not like frogs
and turtles, polythermal animals that take on the temperature of the environment around them.
We maintain our heat in our being and we die when it is gone. The wind or air element is the
element of circulation. It is that which moves around all of this, which connects one part of the
body to another, or that which connects “us” with “not-us.” This depends on wind, air,
communication. And, however problematic, there is space, which we can’t seem to relate to on
our own. In any case, it is difficult to talk about. Space is said to be closely aligned with the notion
of what we each call my consciousness. All of these elements are dissolving one by one in sequential
order with definite consequences. They are the experiential landmarks in the process of dying.
In the same way, in our moment-to-moment existence, the same thing is possible and
observable. That is, the tangible quality of our existence again dissolves. Sudden groundlessness.
At that moment, one is not sure if one is going to live or die. This is a peak point of uncertainty
about whether one is actually having something important happen, meaningful happen, or if one
is going insane, losing touch completely, and entering the nether world beyond reach. Basic conflict
appears when we lose touch with physical ground as tangible environmental contact. An ordinary

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sense of logic seems to disappear—that is the earth element dissolving. When this happens to any
of us, there is seemingly a reflex action that attempts to reassure ourselves that everything is working
just fine. Nothing terrible has happened. It is still working. Mind is still working. After the shock,
there is a sense of reassurance that we are not insane.
The next step, however, is still another moment of doubt. Because still something’s not working
really properly, there is a kind of perching. Because of that, the tendency is to raise the fire and to
entertain thoughts of who it is that we love and who it is that we hate. That becomes, at that
moment, the source of contact, what is still tangible. But even then, those emotions then begin to
dissolve into air, because those emotions suddenly seem to be a cheap trick. There is something
hollow about them. It is at that point that there is a kind of relaxation; one cannot struggle
anymore. At that moment of relaxation, there is what is called luminosity. In terms of the book, it is
called the bardo experience of clear light. But in a prototypical sense, it is pain and pleasure existing
simultaneously with neither predominating and the relaxation that goes along with being able to
bear pain and pleasure equally.
So, there are two extreme forces of hope and fear coming together . . . that you are going to
get somewhere in this life, that you are going to really learn something, possibly attain
enlightenment—and, on the other hand, the whole thing could be a hoax. That, in fact, you are
no better off than where you started from and that maybe by indulging in this whole meditation
experience, you are just driving yourself crazy, slowly but surely. These two extreme forces are
meeting head-on: hope that you are doing the right thing with your little life and fear that you’re
destroying yourself just like your mother said you would. It is at that point of confusion that
luminosity, or basic clarity, is said to dawn.
That dawning can be immediately recognized as the basic intelligence that has been with us all
along, always available, always ready to be acknowledged. It is possible to connect to that, to the
primal, primitive nature that exists within us all the time, that which is called buddha nature as
awakened state of mind. It is that luminosity that points to this: if we had capabilities to connect,
merge, relax into, dissolve into, that basic luminosity, we could understand that from the beginning,
that awakened state of mind was always there and available. But it takes shocks and extreme
conditions like the bardo to bring that recognition about. We are unaccustomed to that; we are so
unused to that kind of clarity that there is panic with it, a moment of panic, and then that clarity
degenerates rather quickly.

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Bardo Experience in the Bardo of Life
Bardo experience is happening all the time in human life, known as the bardo of life. There are six
quite dramatic aspects of the bardo that can be observed in our everyday experience. These can
be momentary or extended flashes of shock and uncertainty, felt as abrupt gaps, interruptions, or
chaos in our apparently continuous flow of mind. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the bardo
teaching is literally applied to the repeating cycle of birth, death, and rebirth for all living beings.
The relevance of this esoteric teaching for us is to use it as a metaphor for the study of the human
mind. This provides us a precise psychology of transitions in and out of states of health and illness,
and practical instructions for working with those transitional and intermediate states. With this
perspective, one understands that the bardo of life includes possibilities of the other five critical bardo
stages. There is the bardo of dreams, which could be, if one could track it, clear bardo experience
through which one could understand one’s basic nature. There is the bardo of meditation, which if
one meditated really correctly, just as we would always like to, could also lead to understanding
one’s basic nature. Then there are: the bardo of the moment of death; the bardo of the moment during death;
and the bardo of the moment of what-you’re-going-to-do-with-yourself after death. Those are the five extreme
prototypes of bardo experience, which are said to be happening all the time within the process of
our waking and sleeping consciousness. We know their dimensions and their landmarks by their
extreme forms, but they are also said to exist between one conscious thought and the next in the
bardo of life. Each bardo is potentially a peak point of recognition of the true nature of our mind,
and how it works, or doesn’t work. That is our problem. That is our opportunity. That is why we
practice this meditation. We study things like The Tibetan Book of the Dead; we study death to have a
personal relationship with death in order to understand our own life, to understand how to proceed
properly with our life. If we understand that correctly, then maybe we have a possibility of helping
other people do that with their lives. That is why we teach this in the psychology and psychotherapy
programs.

Student: I have two questions. One is: what is the thing that continues between all these bardos—
what is the continuity? The second one is: you said at one point in your talk that “the nature of
consciousness is space.” Does that mean that space has the quality, the aware quality, that I seem
to associate with mind?
Ed: I don’t know what continues. But I know continues! These simple analogies—go to sleep at
night and enter a dream bardo—maybe dwell on different planets with absolute conviction, replete

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with all the experiences, all the sensual phenomena while being somewhere else, someone else—
and you wake up in the morning and it is the same old thing. After, beyond that, we wake up. We
go brush our teeth again. We look in the mirror, and it is the same old thing and completely
recognizable and we think for a moment, while looking in the mirror and brushing our teeth and
shaving, “where have I been?” There is this sense of continuity and a sense that the continuity has
been broken—discontinuity—and that happens continually with all kinds of experiences. Even
with hallucinogenic experiences with chemicals of all kinds, and with ever more exaggerated
experiences such as psychotic experiences where one completely loses this continuity and if you
are lucky and recover, maybe it’s the same old thing. There are extraordinary bridges in the
continuity of what we call this mind or this consciousness. And yet there is a revival of mind from
discontinuity, a return of it, re-birth of it; it gets put back together again. Watch someone recover
from psychosis and you can watch mind be put back together again. Or watch someone, or oneself,
coming out of a hallucinogenic, or what used to be called psychotomimetic, trip; you watch them being
put back together again: taking form, re-birthing, reforming, entering this body again, and so forth.
So, there are innumerable experiences where there is a breach of continuity and then continuity
again that happen in the bardo of life. We surmise that it keeps on going like that.
Regarding consciousness and space, in terms of the dissolution of the bodily processes, it is the
element of consciousness that seems to be the last to become disrupted. You could follow, you
could track, everything as you die. Earth dissolving, bones dissolving, water dissolving, heat
dissolving, cold, clammy, wind, totally losing it—your bowels evacuate at that moment, you just
fart and your bowels go, and you gasp and your lungs just collapse. The wind just goes right out of
you. You could see that. You could watch that. And people, if they survive that, could tell you
about it.
They say consciousness is the last to go and it is linked to the element of space, the final element.
And why is it linked to the element of space, other than the fact that it is the final element, the last
to go? And why is it the most encompassing of all? Space allows all the elements to exist within it.
And consciousness is what allows all the other elements of the body and mind to exist within it. As
space is to the universe and to the galaxy, so consciousness is to the body and to life. Consciousness
encompasses and sees everything, watches the whole thing, and is the last to go because it is the
vastest. There are other answers to this, but that is the best I can do at the moment.

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 Student: Ed, besides our own immediate experience day to day, moment to moment, what makes
this book not just another theory?
Ed: In terms of moment-to-moment consciousness?
S: In terms of the Big Death. What happens when we die.
Ed: The Big Death! The Big D. Well, we should definitely check that out. You do not want to
be sitting in that car with the bricks all around you, dying, and you say, “Oh, yeah! The book was
right!” Or when you are eighty years old and on a tube and you say, “I remember that course now.
I took that course in 1986.” You should check that out now. Because if it is wrong, blow it off. If it
is right, there is a lot you should be doing right now.
S: So, you are not going to give me an answer?
Ed: Of how to tell you it is not theory? Later I will go through six bardos of existence and
describe the crisis points of those. That is perhaps the most concrete I can make this. I’ll try. But
you are right, you are absolutely right. There is no reason in the world that you should not say,
“This is another theory.”
S: I don’t necessarily believe it is . . .
Ed: But we all have the same question.

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 II.
The Iconography of Visions: Six Realms and Six Bardos

I n continuing our discussion of the bardo state of mind, I would like to put things into a more
practical, living situation rather than into the more abstract way we have talked about it so far.
The general formula, or basic pattern, I talked about before was a kind of rising intensification of
energies that seem to suddenly pop and then dissolve into the bardo state. That moment of
dissolving or relaxation is what gives rise to the experience of clear light, or luminosity, or
spaciousness, or space, or emptiness, with action in it. And the action is that luminosity can be
merged with, or it can become diluted and can fall apart into what is known as the six realms of
human life.
The six realms of existence are what comprise the bardo of life. We have talked about the six
kinds of bardo experience: the bardo of life—which contains the dream bardo, meditation bardo,
and moment before death bardo; the bardo of luminosity; and the bardo of becoming. The bardo
of life basically consists of the six realms of existence—it is the bardo of existence. In a sense, each
one of these realms is considered a bardo in and of itself. In the commentaries on the Tibetan Book
of the Dead, they refer to each realm as a bardo. On the other hand, within any one of the six realms,
all six qualities of the bardo can appear. For example, within the realm of gods, the heaven realm,
one can identify the experience of a bardo of dream, a bardo of becoming, a bardo of the moment
before death, and so on. So that complicates things a bit.
But the fact is that the six realms of the bardo of existence (the bardo of our life) is complicated.
We know this. It is complicated. We know that living our lives seems to be complicated. As much
as we would like to reduce ourselves, distill ourselves, simplify ourselves, to a life of simplicity and
discipline, it turns out to be complicated. There are a great many things going on and a great many
opportunities happening and we are not the kind of people to miss opportunities. There is a
tremendous amount of richness, choice, and fertility happening within those six realms of existence.
On the other hand, they seem to wind up in the same old place: birth, old age, sickness, and
death—and that is why all the six realms of existence are referred to as the vicious state of samsara.25

25. Samsara is a Sanskrit term that means wandering or world, with the connotation of cyclic, circuitous change. Ed
emphasizes the endless cycling of a person through the self-projected six realms of existence, each with its own kind
of bewilderment and suffering. Samsara is said to be “vicious” in its merciless grip on living beings in its jaws of death.

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None of them last very long, even though some of the realms are supposed to last for eon upon
eon. In fact, within a single day of our life, perhaps even one hour of meditation experience, all of
the six realms make their vicious appearance. They revolve and revolve and revolve and revolve
to the point of dizziness. That is what has traditionally been called the samsaric whirlpool.
There are many ways to talk about the six realms of existence. There are hundreds of ways to
approach this topic. Although many may have heard the description of the six realms of existence
a number of times, and may find it to be slightly low-level or boring, the actual fact is that the
teachings we have inherited emphasize the recognition of the six realms over and over again. When
the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche first came to this country, all of his intensive
seminars for the first three years, or more, were involved with the six realms of existence. There
are literally hundreds of pages of transcripts that deal with the six realms of existence because it is
such a fundamental part of these teachings. And since there are innumerable takes on them—ways
to approach them and ways to understand them—there have been many descriptions.

Six Realms as Opportunity

The Tibetan Book of the Dead has a slightly different description of the six realms of existence than
some of the other teachings. It stresses a particular high point of a realm—a hot point, a crisis
point. Each realm has a critical point. In a sense, to be in a realm at all is to be in a state of crisis.
Although we may not know that in any moment, our presence in a realm is eventually leading to
a state of crisis. It is particularly interesting for psychologists to hear this bad news about the realms
and about what constitutes a state of crisis. On the other hand, there is something about a way of
talking about the six realms that is also good news. It is good news in terms of opportunity.
To be able to recycle through the six realms at all, in this human birth, is considered to be very
good fortune. To be able to hear about the six realms and to understand them and perhaps even
see through them in their critical points of opportunity is considered to be quite a blessing. Those
that live in the other realms have no opportunity to practice. Those who have a human birth, such
as ourselves—no matter which realm we are in at a particular moment, or for the rest of the day,
or for the rest of our lives—we still have an opportunity to practice. No other beings have that

Another connotation of “vicious” is that one can feel imprisoned in a realm with no hope of freedom and relief, and
even if one escapes a realm, there is another one waiting to swallow you up. It is said that clearly seeing this samsaric
cycle is a powerful motivation to pursue a spiritual path of freedom from such personal madness. —J. Fortuna

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capability or are met with that kind of good fortune. In spite of our complaints about the vicious
state of samsara, in spite of our remorse about having to go through these realms over, and over,
and over again, we have the opportunity to use them as a basis, a foundation, a springboard, of
practice . . . depending on how much we understand about them.
And so the teachings of the six realms have been presented in the Buddhist tradition, and in
particular in the Kagyu Buddhist tradition, over and over again because our memories are
somewhat dull and we forget things easily. Dr. Karen Kissel Wegela describes in meditation
instruction a reminder to see how you arise out of meditation, to see how you walk post meditation,
to see how you cross the threshold of the door, to see how you go from one transition to another—
which is a very interesting practice. On the other hand, within two minutes after hearing such
instruction, we forget. And it is nobody’s fault. You hear the instructions, “watch how you cross
the threshold,” and then two minutes later you are going to the bathroom and don’t remember a
thing about it.
It is the same way with instructions in practicing wakefulness during falling asleep and into a
dream. You hear the instructions of how to do it, how to maintain your awareness, how to rouse
your aspiration or motivation to do such a practice, but it may take you three months before you
can do it consecutively two nights in a row, just to remember, on hitting the bed. We are a little bit
dull. We are a little bit thick about some of these things. And we are not talking about high, middle,
and low capacity human beings—we are talking about all of us. We are a little bit thick. And that
is why the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the reminder of death being at our doorstep
may heighten our memory capacities and may motivate us to exert ourselves in the post-meditation
practices that are so abundant in these teachings.
As we approach the study of the psychology of the six realms, we have to acknowledge our own
personal resistance, even dread. Each of the realms has its own quality of heavy claustrophobia
and entrapment. The fact that they are arranged in a circular pattern conveys the dizzying cycle
of going around and around through them. We often choose to ignore such experiences of our own
mind, which are all too close to home. We can feel aversion to entering and exploring those realms
as personal study, and try to keep learning on an intellectual level instead. Yet it is inescapable to
do so in terms of bringing these particular teachings about the bardos and realms into everyday
practicality for us. The intention to study the six realms to free ourselves and others from their
suffering helps us overcome such resistance.

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 The bardo experiences I talked about earlier are of that in-between state, no man’s land, no
body’s territory that exists as the interlude between birth and death and between death and birth.
In particular, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which focuses on the bardo between death and birth, is a
robust, impeccable metaphor of what bardo experience could possibly be, in all of its variety of
subtle forms of the six realms in our living state. Bardo is between death and birth, but really it is
between sanity and insanity. These are the somewhat esoteric teachings I have touched on already.

Madness and Sanity Are Closely Linked

What we are really talking about is the state, interlude, or gap between confusion and wakefulness.
But in our everyday life situation, in the mundane aspect of the way we live, it is between sanity
and insanity; it is between health and madness. That is not a metaphor. That is not an analogy.
This is a particularly odious and offensive concept to Western psychology in general—that
madness and sanity are so closely linked together. But the teachings of bardo psychology make that
very apparent. In each of the realms, that is the issue: the juncture between wakeful sanity and
totally confused madness. I am not using poetry here. I need to make this very clear. When I say
madness, I mean psychosis—the worst of what you have seen and imagined. When I say sanity, I mean
the best of what you have seen and imagined. They are very closely linked together. And it is the
bardo state of being that points to the fusion of those two seemingly impossible states. The real
metaphor I used earlier was bardo (the in-between state) as the river with the island in the middle;
the island being the high point, peak point, peak experience, and the river is the space around that.
The six realms of existence are the six aspects of space—six intensified aspects of space—and
so are not as solid as they may appear. It is just because they are nothing but intensified aspects of
space that it is possible to transmute those states into six awakened states of mind. I will concentrate
more on the particular neurosis of each state of existence later. The complete realm cycle can be
described in terms of a passage through six distinctive states of mind, each being characterized by
a predominant emotion. Each involves a way of perceiving the world—has its own needs, logic,
associations, symbols, iconography, and bodily sensations. In this sense, they are not so much states
of mind as they are realms of being, or existential realms.
There are so many things that might be talked about in any of these realms, but to get to the
point, the issue is: how one enters a realm—which, according to the bardo teachings and our
previous discussion, is a falling away from clear light. We will discuss the realms in terms of several

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aspects: how one falls away from clear light (the luminosity during the bardo of the moment before
death); how one enters a realm; how that realm gathers and exaggerates itself; and how the realm
combusts to a bardo state (where, again, there is intensification to an extreme degree, to a point of
relaxation and luminosity); and how then again, one enters a new realm. In terms of the realms,
we could concentrate on these categories: how one falls out of this seeming state of grace, how one
enters the realm, and how the realm builds up then explodes all over again. The thing to keep in
mind in all of this is that in each of these realms, there is a particular absorption state that leads to
the build-up to this intensity or the build-up of energies. That absorption state is that state of mind
that becomes so concentrated, fascinated, fixated, on the particular object of concentration that
mind-body coordination is severely interfered with. That brings about the process of dying, as we
talked about last session. Mind-body synchronization becomes so separated that the tangible
quality of earth, body, is lost and mind begins to wander with increasing speed.

God Realm
To begin with them in-depth, there is what is known as the heavenly realm, the god realm, known in
Sanskrit as the deva realm. It is the realm of the Titans, in terms of Greek mythology. We may say
that the names of these particular states of existence have a kind of mythological ring to them,
which is very true, but that is because many mythologies have recognized the same states of
existence. Those who are deeply involved and saturated with, and absorbed in these states, use
these words themselves to describe their state of mind. August Strindberg—who was absolutely
insane in Luxembourg Garden in Paris in 1910—wrote in his journal that this is the realm of
paradise and the realm of the gods, where everything tastes like beautiful flowers and every
sensation is magnificent. And he dwelt for shockingly short periods of time in this Garden of Eden,
so to speak. However, in a realm of heaven like this, this heavenly state of being, in this ambrosia
state of being, there are thirty-three degrees of it, thirty-three levels of it, thirty-three intensifications
of it, as have been noted and tracked by our observers.
In the realm of the gods, those who enter the bardo state experience the luminosity and love it.
They cannot get enough of it. They have an immediate attraction to the pleasure that accompanies
such a state. They are lost, as it were, in meditative absorption. They love meditation. But we are
not talking about they, right? We love meditation, at times, and are maybe even embarrassed about
our spiritual materialism. The point is that the meditation experience is as if commandeered by

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the ego, in the sense that the meditation experience becomes a vehicle to empower oneself further
and further. It becomes a way to accomplish more and more, experience more and more
meditative pleasure, joy. These are, at first, very interesting experiences, but then can become a
trap of fascination. Single-pointed, one-pointed devotion to such effort in meditation allows one to
experience a limitless sense of consciousness, limitless space. That point is considered the thirty-
third state in the realm of the gods, called formless gods. Dwelling in formlessness, dwelling in the
incomparability and vastness of space, one can almost relax, but not quite; there is still someone
who is taking a credential out of such an achievement. There is still an experiencer, still fascination,
still grasping.
And fascination and grasping automatically, organically, bring what is known in Buddhist
teachings as a state of regression. This is an interesting counterpoint to the Western psychological
usage of the term regression. Here regression means that the state of mind you are involved in falls
apart. Any attempt to hold on to anything falls apart. That seems to be the basic law of nature, of
mind-nature, in any case. And that is operating throughout all of the realms, but in particular in
the god realm because there is nothing quite like this one. On the other hand, there is some actual
exhaustion in attempting to hold on to this pleasurable state. And one could tire of the rarified,
ethereal atmosphere of this kind of meditative experience. Dissatisfaction actually creeps in. One
lusts for and yearns for a more rugged, emotional experience—and then . . . you have lost it. You
stepped out of the luminosity. You took a great deal of pride in that, fully confident that you could
maintain yourself in an absorption of peace and security, intoxicated with the experience of
meditative pleasure—and then you lost it.

Jealous God Realm

And what you lose it to is the next state in this regressive series of states of mind; it is known as the
asura realm, which means “almost god realm” or “jealous god realm.” Another way to say that is,
“Once you were a god and now all you do is remember that once you were a god and are jealous
of those who still are.” You remember that you had those experiences in meditation. The realm of
gods was connected with the clear light, and each of the six realms has a particular trademark in
terms of the bardo that they are related to. The jealous god realm is related to the bardo of birth,
or becoming. It is related to taking form, getting on with it, push. It is the great push. And, as we
know, and as anyone who has done space awareness practice knows, this is the action situation.

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This is the time to get on with everything. This is, in fact, the opposite of the spacious magnificence
and peacefulness of the god realm. This is getting on with it. This is really doing things. This is
really touching the earth, compared with the spiritual absorption of the god realm. This is energy.
From the jealous god realm perspective, this is wonderful, compared with that. Things can really
get done.
So, this realm is about absorption in energy, absorption in one’s own capacity to create action,
to make things happen. And there is this grasping, fascination, and intoxication with activity. There
is a very intimate level of doing things, touching things, taking things, making this happen. There
is no gap, no doubt, rushing. The ultimate dream of this realm is to have no doubt; it is to push
beyond doubt. So when one enters this realm from the bardo situation, one is suddenly separated
from luminosity—that seems to be the experience. It is not gradual; it is sudden. It is abrupt, and
one is somewhat cheated out of what has been happening in the bardo. Someone enters this realm
with a sort of bewilderment and a kind of paranoia. One looks back on what has happened in the
bardo of luminosity and feels something has gone wrong and someone else is probably to blame
for that. So, there is quite a quality of intrigue; wanting to figure out, “Who is to blame and why
they did it to me at all. What on earth could have been their inspiration?” All kinds of
rationalizations and justifications fill in that picture. There is absorption in an attempt to achieve
something, which is based purely on mind speed, and physical speed, and action speed. This is a
real thing. These are the people who sail around the world single-handedly, in boats, alone—right?
This is the real thing. They can really do it.
The key point of the bardo, the hot point, is the confusion that arises the moment you are very
much on the verge of thinking you are getting somewhere, that something really is about to happen,
but there is a sudden doubt because at the same time, you feel you are losing ground and you have
lost everything that you have been trying to achieve. The dreamy quality makes its appearance in
the form of a doubt that here you might have been taking the next evolutionary step in the human
species and in fact you can’t tell; you don’t know how to read the time of day. An “error” reading
creeps in. All of these hot-point moments within the realms are moments of error. You thought
you were getting somewhere and nothing is happening. So, there is confusion. The particular style
of this realm is to push right through that, push right through that doubt and hesitation. It must
mean that “if this happened to me, this doubt happened to me, I must have not quite have been
going fast enough.” So you rev it up! And then the energy builds up to the same thing. You have

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this trust in speed, trust that this is what will bring you through. When in doubt, you step on the
gas. Perhaps absolute speed will lead to absolute stillness. You intend that, but, in fact, it does not
happen and you are as paranoid as ever, being cheated once again out of possible near
attainment.26

Human Realm
To continue the regressive series, the degradation of this kind of energy leads to the human realm.
Now, to make this clearer, what we are describing as the six realms is happening in ordinary human
life—and there is also a realm of humanness that happens in human life, as an exaggeration of
human life. This is connected with the so called bardo of body. Of course, there is no such thing as
the bardo of body in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is not really the body. It is called body of illusion,
or illusory body. This is the body that we think actually becomes born, which is the psychosomatic
body. The jealous god realm is connected with the bardo of becoming—just get on with it and
become something, make something of yourself. Right? It is the search for existence, the impulse
to come into existence. In the human realm, the form that existence might take is the illusory body.
As we know, the human realm quality has a basic instinct to it, which is passion. It is passion
in the broadest sense: desiring things for ourselves and evaluating our experiences in terms of
whether they are turning out right, or whether they are pleasurable or not. We have this
tremendous capability of discriminating between pleasure and pain that is unheard of in the
universe of sentient beings. We have this fine-tuned capability of noticing pleasure and pain, even
about every single thought we have. In terms of space around the peak point, the island, the hot
point, there is a river of passion, a river of desire.
In the pure human realm, because of our thinking capabilities, and because imagination in
itself is brought to its highest evolutionary state, we can imagine anything. We can imagine

26. In this section, Ed makes several references to the parable of Donald Crowhurst in Recovering Sanity (2003), which
is a study in the jealous god realm. For example, Ed describes “revenge of the ground” of one’s intelligence:
The persecution that psychotic people begin to feel at this stage is a personification of their own doubt, a doubt
that has been ignored and aggressively cut short with the increasing speed of mind. For Crowhurst, there came
the inevitable revenge of his own mind. The doubt that he tried to obliterate was an indestructible aspect of his
mind, a sign of his basic intelligence. It sometimes makes itself known in the only transfigured forms allowable:
hallucinations of images, voices, and feeling states. They demand attention. Again, it is in a nightmare, where
the persecutors became more insistent the more one tries to ignore them. That is to say, doubt eventually returns
even if it has to clothe itself in the animated images of fear. (114) —J. Fortuna

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anything our hearts desire. In fact, we generally imagine everything our hearts desire before we
even go about trying to attain such desires. That is our great capability and vulnerability at the
same time. We can imagine, even before striving for something, a total wish-fulfilling satisfaction
in the realm of mind. But that is not quite good enough because we need the actual, physical,
tangible pleasure involved in it. And so, the illusory body27 is how to put together mind and body:
how to put together the mind of imagined satisfaction and the body that experiences the central
pleasure of that satisfaction. That is the dilemma of the human realm.
The human realm is the realm of hallucinations. More than most other beings, we are subject
to hallucinations—and we live in constant uncertainty because of that. Because we know of these
capabilities, we know of them through merely looking at our dream life. We know how subject we
are to imagining our desires. There is always a lurking uncertainty about whether it is illusory or
real, whether we are getting somewhere in this life, or whether we’re just standing still or doing
worse. That doubt escalates, particularly in this realm, to the uncertainty of whether we are going
crazy or not. We doubt whether we are attaining enlightenment, whatever that means to us, or
whether we are becoming insane. That is the hot point of the human realm.

Animal Realm
The regressive series continues to the animal realm. Obviously, this is not intended to disparage our
animal friends, but rather to think of a state of mind with the capacity for such closed-mindedness,
for such a small, one-pointed, narrow world. That is the way most animals seem to have to live. As
the tradition states, if you corner a tiger in the jungle, it has no idea what to do other than to try to
kill you because it cannot tell whether it might be killed or not. It has narrow vision and some kind
of confusion. Its life is based on instinct and survival. The brilliance of the tiger is the brilliance of

27. This idea of the “illusory body” of the human realm becomes the basis for the first of the four foundations of
mindfulness as taught by Chögyam Trungpa: of body, of life, of effort, and of mind. In this way, mindfulness
meditation is designed to directly connect with the dilemmas of the human realm. Chögyam Trungpa explains:
To begin with, there is some problem about what we understand by “body.” We have a body. We sit on chairs
or on the ground; we eat; we sleep; we wear clothes. But the body we relate with in going through these activities
is questionable. Is it the unconditional body, free from any conceptualizations; or is it a body constituted by
conceptualizations? According to the tradition, the body we have is what is known as the “mind-body” or
psychosomatic body. It is largely based on projections and concepts of the body. This mind-body contrasts with
the enlightened person’s sense of body, which might be called “body-body.” This is just simple and
straightforward. There is a direct relationship with the earth. As for us, we do not actually have a relationship
with the earth. We have some relationship with our body, but it is very uncertain and erratic. We flicker back
and forth between body and something else—fantasies, ideas. That seems to be our basic situation. (Garuda IV:
The Foundations of Mindfulness 1976, 22) —J. Fortuna

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the animal realm. It moves very quickly, very safely, and knows exactly when and where to strike
when it is threatened. There is not that much room for speculation.
The animal realm is driven by primitive instinct and emotions which want to possess and hold
on to, to secure, one’s state of being. So, one steps out of luminosity, in this case, into a state of
ignoring things. Ignoring what just happened, we try to remain secure, very practical and solid,
and to lead one’s life according to domesticated rules of things. Anything unpredictable or
unknown seems to be very shocking and threatening. The problem here (that leads to the hot point
of this realm) is that this ignoring as a sense of confusion, and holding onto the rules of things and
the narrow order of things so as not to get distracted, is a kind of studied confusion. A pride develops
about this.
There is pride in every one of the realms. In the god realm, it is pride of spiritual attainment.
In the jealous god realm, the realm of the paranoid, there is pride in the intelligence of seeing
behind one’s own back. In the human realm, there is pride in the imaginative capabilities that can
make things appear before they appear. In the animal realm, there is pride in confusion itself, pride
that says, “I will not give in. I will not yield to what is entering the periphery of my vision.” This is
the solid corridor of vision and stubbornness, unearthly stubbornness. Beyond that, this pride of
ignorance, pride of confusion, pride of straightforwardness leads to a kind of power play. Because
so many things are coming into your vision, you have to override them. You have to block them
out.
The animal realm is associated with the bardo of dreams, known in Tibetan as the milam bardo,
because the animal realm has a central quality of vagueness. This vagueness always seems to lurk
behind even the most brilliant dream of all: uncertainty about whether one is asleep or awake.
There is a hot point of the animal realm. One steps out of luminosity into total ignorance, pride in
that ignorance, escalation into not only the pride but exerting the power of that pride over other
people. Then one is not certain any more if one is awake or asleep and whether one is absolutely
weak or absolutely powerful. Just as in the dream, the question comes up: “Am I an extremely
gentle person or an absolutely arrogant bully?” That uncertainty of being asleep or awake, getting
somewhere or not, is the indecision and the craziness of the animal dream, animal realm.
The degradation, or regression, continues—if it happens sequentially like this. Generally, it
does not happen so sequentially. We can move, bounce, from one conscious realm to another; it
does not have a particular movement. So much depends on outside circumstances that might move

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us from one realm to another. On the other hand, in terms of the phenomena of psychosis there is
a particular prototypical movement from one realm to another. The cycle of the realms goes from
human realm, to hungry ghost realm, to animal realm, pinnacling in god realm, degrading into
jealous god realm, and then into hell. Psychosis can have this sequential conglomeration of realms,
but the realms can also go helter-skelter, one to another. In the prototypical sequence, the animal
realm degrades into the realm of the ghosts. Buddhist psychology would call this regression, meaning
the devolution of one’s intelligence.28

Hungry Ghost Realm

In the hungry ghost realm, known in Sanskrit as the preta realm, there are a number of different
kinds of these beings. Or, in terms of our psychology, there are a number of different intensities of
this state of being, of this realm of existence. There are thirty-three degrees of intensity in the god
realm. There are several degrees of intensity in the jealous god realm. In the animal realm, there
are only eight. In the hungry ghost realm, there are something like eight or ten, depending on the
intensity of the instinct. The instinct in this case means “consumption”: the instinct to grasp, the
instinct to collect, the instinct to learn everything. In some ways, the hungry ghost realm is
considered the student’s disease because you can’t quite get enough. And just when you think you
might be getting enough, you don’t really understand it. Then, instead of anything else you might
do, you try to get more. Like the jealous gods, you just try when you feel you are failing, and this
presses the acceleration further. Like the ghosts, when satisfaction is not coming, you try to
consume even more. So, the degrees of this realm depend on the intensity of this kind of grasping
to consume. Hunger for food and thirst for drink seem to dominate this realm. In terms of the
metaphors of what goes on during this state of existence, it seems everything is turned into what is

28. In Recovering Sanity (2003), Ed presents a diagram of this realm pattern of psychosis, which he calls “The Cyclic
Journey of Losing Mind.” He closely explores John Perceval’s psychotic journey with this perspective, which he
continues to apply to the other parables in his book. Realm psychology is core to the view of contemplative
psychotherapy. Here is his summary:
The complete cycle can be described in terms of a passage through six distinctive states of mind, each being
characterized by a predominant emotion and a world seen through different colored glasses. Each involves a
way of perceiving the world—has its own needs, logic, associations, symbols, iconography, and bodily sensations.
In this sense, they are not so much states of minds as they are ‘realms’ of being, or existential realms. In no way
are these realms unique to psychosis; each can be recognized within one’s ordinary life as more or less a transient
state of being. In various heightened states of neurosis, one or another of these realms can be seen in an
intensified form. But in the gathering of a full-blown psychosis, the realms are tremendously exaggerated and
strung together to create a complete and tortuous experience of insanity. (35) —J. Fortuna

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consumable, even other human beings and relationships. And that’s what makes these people so
problematic to be around. The satisfaction doesn’t really come from possessing something that
they might find out, but it is from the search; it is from the hunt that pleasure seems to come. They
suffer with insatiable hunger and intense envy of other people who seem to be able to eat and enjoy
themselves.
Such states of mind might include desperately wanting to consume something—to have
something, to collect something, to own something—but once you get near it, you can’t quite enjoy
it. Or, if you manage to get your hands on it and are about to eat it, something stands in your way.
Circumstances occur. The waiter says, “Sorry, the restaurant is closed; the kitchen is out and non-
functioning.” A further degree of painful intensity of this realm is that if they open the kitchen
again for you, and you do manage to force your way in and eat, the food burns in your esophagus
or is like acid in your stomach. You cannot consume it, and if you do, you are preoccupied with
whether or not you should vomit it.
Another way to put it is that the bardo in this state is whether you should eat it down or vomit
it up, whether you should hold on to it or let it go. The bardo is whether you should keep on
keeping-on—keep on grasping, trying to attain something that way—or whether you should give
it up, let go of your own hunger. Like every other realm we are talking about, it reaches a point of
intensity of hunger and purging, hunger and even relaxing, of equal intensity in which pleasure
and pain are almost indistinguishable. Pleasure and pain have a quality of oneness, one taste, one
experience; they blend into each other and you cannot tell them apart. That is the hot point of the
realm of hunger and ghostliness. The final degradation is when there is nowhere else to go but to
what is considered the psychological realm of hell.

Hell Realm
In the hell realm (known in Sanskrit as the naraka realm), there are eighteen different kinds, specific
qualities, intensifications, degrees of hell that have been tracked and distinguished. The hell realm
is associated with the bardo of the moment of death. That is it. There is a finality. It is desperate.
It is the end of the world. It is based on aggression, obviously. One has stepped out of the
luminosity, out of the bardo, with a temptation to fight. There is pride in that feistiness. A kind of
paranoia develops and then the intensification is to absolute terror. There are all kinds of
descriptions in world literature about hell: Dante’s Inferno, and, once again, Strindberg and his long

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journal about the end result of his psychosis, which he also called Inferno. “Paradise” then “inferno”;
that is the total manic-depressive nightmare. But the important point to make is that hell is a real
situation, and with eighteen degrees of it, there is room for a lot of possibilities. This is not literary.
This is not mythological. After WWII, some of the generals came out saying, “War is hell.” And
we said, “That’s right, yes, looks terrible.” We see news clips of people dying, being blown up,
migrating, leaving home, everything is disrupted. That is a limited form of hell.
People in extreme forms of hell feel the need to act so as to pursue their vision of hell. We have
heard stories and seen people who mutilate themselves, gouge out their eyes, castrate themselves,
amputate their arms and legs, or amputate their breasts and use a hot, electric iron to cauterize the
wound. This is the action of hell. It is not our little depression. It is not our black mood of the
morning, “I don’t want to go to work; I can’t stand living anymore.” That’s not hell. Hell is total
terror and being overwhelmed by the aggression and its projected environment, which all started
from the act of leaving the luminosity and suddenly putting up your dukes. You have a threatening,
feisty, attitude toward the world and everything good deteriorates from there. You want to destroy
your projections and you want to, in the end, to destroy the perceiver of those projections. You
want to escape from yourself, transform out of yourself—it is suicide country. It is basic hatred of
impermanence. I think you get the idea.

Connecting with Basic Intelligence

I hope you get the idea that there is a buildup of energy within each of the realms. An intensification
of the instinct or the emotion toward making a solid sense of self within each of the realms. That
particular instinct escalates to the point where it bursts into a doubt about whether anything is
happening or not, about whether or not the wheels have just been spinning to gain something:
spiritual attainment, or power, or hunger, or desire for pleasure. Whatever it is, whatever the object
of perception is, one is on the verge of absolutely attaining the whole thing or losing the whole
thing. Pleasure and pain, hope and fear blend into each other and you cannot tell them apart. That
sense of oneness of the situation leads to relaxation—exhaustion, at times, with the whole
endeavor—and then there is the possibility of bardo occurring. That is what is known as the bardo
of life, of existence.
To briefly summarize: complete relaxation of struggle allows us to recognize the basic
intelligence that has been with us all along, always available, always ready to be acknowledged. It

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is possible to connect to that, to the primal awakened nature that exists within us all the time. It is
that luminosity that points to this: if we had capabilities to connect, relax and dissolve into that
basic luminosity, we could recognize that from the beginning, that awakened state of mind was
always there and available. But it takes the shocks and extreme conditions of the bardo to bring
that recognition about. We are so unaccustomed to that kind of clarity that there is a moment of
panic, and then that clarity degenerates rather quickly. It deteriorates into the six realms of human
life. Each realm is a potential dimension, or experience, of being alive. Each realm can be
extremely neurotic or psychotic. At the peak point of each of these six realms there are critical
bardo states. During each of those crisis moments, bardo experience flashes and is the opportunity
to understand our basic, awakened state of mind.29 Missing the opportunity is just another mindless
orgasm where one just gets up and wants to have pizza.

Student: In the first section you said that the bardo experience is said to exist between each
conscious thought. I was wondering what it is about the conscious thought that makes it not a
bardo experience. In other words, I have a question about where the edges of the bardo experience
are.
Ed: That is the real question: what is the edge? The teachings are that the bardo states are
continuously happening in rapid succession. We have the capability of tuning into that. But such
states are also very low key, and the bardo experience happening between each conscious thought
is possibly the subtlest form. This is in distinction to the most extreme form of all: the death of this
present existence and our entering whatever it is that is coming next. So there is this continuum of
the intensity of the bardo, with the moment of gap in thinking being the subtlest and most difficult
to distinguish. The edges are, I suppose, the edges of a conscious thought, if you can observe that.
Whatever you see is what you get, right? But, on the other hand, what we are talking about now is

29. In Transcending Madness (1992), Chögyam Trungpa provides a succinct and elegant summary of the realms, their
immediate reality for us, and their relationship with the bardos:
This whole series of situations, the six types of bardo experience, is present all the time. There is the domestic
problem of the hungry ghosts, in terms of comfort, luxury, hunger, and thirst. There is the competitive problem
of the jealous gods, the asura realm. There is the spiritual problem of the world of the gods. There is the problem
of relationship and communication, which is the world of hell, or naraka. There is the problem of not opening,
which is the animal realm. There is the problem of being sucked into situations and grasping, which is the human
realm. These realms are not other lands, not situations outside. They are within us; we have domestic problems,
emotional problems, spiritual problems, relationship problems. All of these are very apparent; they are right
here. And each of these problems has its exit or highlight. In each there is the possibility of completely flipping
out or of stepping out of the confusion. Each situation presents its highlight of this and that. (164) —J. Fortuna

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paying more attention, increasing awareness, toward these seemingly unconscious states of being,
the realms, which can be made conscious through meditation practice, and to experience the
buildup of these energies, and the flash point of these energies, and the relaxation that occurs at
that moment. We need to be reminded to do that because even as simple a practice as watching
your mind as you cross a threshold, you cannot remember to do in the time between entering the
bathroom and leaving the bathroom, right? What has been talked about as the ground, the
fundamental ground, of the study of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and all the psychology that goes
along with that, is a quality of exertion. We really do have to rouse something to remind ourselves
to practice anything.
S: So, if I understand, you are saying that the way to experience the edges is by this process of
building up to the pop.
Ed: Yes, we can at least do that.

Student: Following that up, as you build up to the hot point, you pass out of that into a bardo
state . . .
Ed: You pass out, right.
S: You just dissolve out.
Ed: You pass out.
S: You were talking about going down the scale of degradation. Are there intermediate stages
of clarity?
Ed: The bardo!
S: You reach the hot point with each stage, with each realm. Do you pass into a state of clarity
between each, or do you just zip down into the next one?
Ed: You pass out into the bardo. You faint. You swoon. It could be a total black out—you could
miss the whole thing; you could oversleep. Or you could wake up during the swoon, the faint, the
panic, the blackout, and you could see what is happening. That is said to be “clear light,” or “clarity
of awareness,” untrampled, unsullied, by what has happened before or after. You could either take
advantage of that or you could, by the force of tendency behind you, of habit pattern, go into the
next level of regression—or any level of regression. They are all regression.
S: So that would be, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where you encounter each
wisdom presence, known as Tathagata, in that moment of encounter? Where you have a choice to
go with a Tathagata or . . .

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 Ed: Yes.
S: The new light, or to go off?
Ed: Right, yes. You have a choice point, depending on your training, inclination, and your
habits coming together. It is not quite a choice; it is the choice that has been building up for you
before all that happened. So, for people looking for this bardo: it is on the edges of each conscious
moment. It is also said to be at the moment of astonishment, or where one might pass out, faint. It
is also said to be at the moment of orgasm, any extreme bodily situation like that.

Student: Back to the animal realm. I missed the connection, the relationship, between the bardo
of dreams and the animal realm. Could you say a few more words?
Ed: Frankly, this has puzzled me. The best that I can come up with is that it is about this quality
of vagueness and the studied confusion of the animal realm. “Just keep it that way. I live my life. I
do my routine. And I don’t need anything interrupting that.” That has a quality of vagueness to it.
And the vagueness is associated with the quality of vagueness that can be discerned in a dream
because the dream is put together, a sort of sandwich of brilliance and vagueness at the same time.
And you never know what is happening—oscillating between vagueness and brilliance within any
single dream. I think that is what they mean. You do not know whether you are asleep or not in
the dream. It would require a seemingly tremendous exertion of one’s intelligence to make a
decision in the dream about whether one is asleep or awake. The conscious life of anyone in the
animal realm of existence has that same quality. They are not quite sure. You could raise that
doubt to them, easily. They might not like you for it, but you could raise that doubt about whether
they are sleeping or awake, sleepwalking or awake. I hope that the clinical application of all of this
is clear.

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 III.
The Mandala Principle: Practice and Presence in the Bardo

T he film Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy, Part III, The Field of the Senses30 is a film you should see more
than once. It is the real thing. It is the way they really do it. The people who literally practice
the Tibetan Book of the Dead do it just like you can see in that film. They are seemingly ancient people
from another planet. That is the real thing. We would like to do the real thing. It is very hard to
do the real thing. Maybe only people living simply, close to the earth can do the real thing, but
that does not seem to be so. We could do the real thing. The real thing, in this case, is: how to die
properly and how to live properly.

Wakeful Practice
The Tibetan Book of the Dead has been said to be not so much a book about how to die, but how to
live. It is not a book of how to end one’s life, but actually of how to begin one’s life. That is, there
is a possibility of falling asleep and dreaming and never waking up. Going from dream to sleep,
from sleep to dream, from dream to sleep, from sleep to dream, from dream to sleep—that could
be the cycle of our existence. In counterpoint to that, the book is about waking up in the extreme
state of the situation. How to wake up from the extreme state of going to sleep—of death. How to
wake up from the extreme state of losing it. That is another of the basic metaphors of the situation:
how to wake up.
At this point in time, we think our current bardo of existence is rather ordinary. So this is a
book of awakenings. Anyone who reads this material, even for the first time, even if it is a cursory
reading, may be impressed by the innumerable practices that are recommended. The limitlessness
of the practices that are suggested at different times is known as the ocean of possibilities. There is, in
fact, no moment of human existence that could not be bound by a sense of practice, that could not
be joined with the possibility of practice. So, within these few pages of text, some sixty pages, there

30. This film is available for free viewing online. The program’s description on tibet-trilogy.com is as follows:
Set in the majestic mountain landscape of Ladakh, [this] is a meditation on impermanence and the relationship
between the mind, body and environment. It follows the monks and farmers through a day, ending with an
unflinching depiction of the monastery’s moving ritual response to a death in the community. As in The Tibetan
Book of the Dead, the departed is guided through the dream-like intermediate state between death and birth. —J.
Fortuna

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are literally hundreds and hundreds of possibilities of practices that are advised for us. It is
staggering and quite helpful, in a sense, that there are these possibilities. Even at the end, even in
the most extreme states of mind, there are these possibilities of joining with a sense of practice.
That is only possible because of the skillfulness of those who have watched our lives and human
life in general and their incredible ingenuity in telling us what we might do at just about any time
of existence—good or bad, extreme or boring. They have invented these possibilities for us to work
with. Who are “they”? “They” are teachers. “They” are people who have observed the process of
living and dying with incredible precision and compassion. So, from that point of view, the Tibetan
Book of the Dead is a book of awakening under any circumstance whatsoever. There is nothing left
out. And we could actually take some joy in this: it is possible that people have invented these
slogans, these gimmicks, these techniques, this advice—and that is possible because they know they
can connect with us. They have incredible confidence that they can connect with us no matter
where we are or how we are manifesting. Whatever trouble we are in, there seems to be this
supreme confidence that they could address us properly, opportunely.

As Mind Dissolves, Wisdoms Emerge

The question is: how could they have that kind of confidence? How could the narrator of this book
and the supervisor of the narrator of this book have had such clarity? It is because, simply speaking,
there is wisdom in the world. There is wisdom in the book. Whether we know it or not, whether
we like it or not, there is wisdom in the world. And that wisdom connects all of us. If we connect
with that wisdom, it connects all of us. The teachers and the meditation instructors that have
proposed these limitless, on-the-spot practices, which may be gone in a moment and then another
practice is recommended, are connecting with the wisdom in the world that does not belong to
anybody, that has nothing to do with what you or I know. It has nothing to do with what we can
talk about. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is said also to be a book about the nature of wisdom; wisdom
in the sense that this wisdom in the world is not just out there, floating in the sky, or coming down
to us from deities of all kinds, but this wisdom is inherent in our life. We are that wisdom, those
wisdoms. And it is because of this that meditation instruction, at any level, can be given to us. The
wisdom that is inherent to us, fundamental to us, can be connected with, no matter where we are
or what we are doing. That is basic psychotherapy.

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 The wisdoms that we are talking about and that our teachers, advisors, meditation instructors,
therapists, or whomever are addressing are not necessarily so clear to us. Therefore, there are
practices that can address them and bring them out, make them more apparent. And there are
many practices that do that. If you watch that film you will see the practice that is being done in
this rather poor monastery on the border of Tibet and Nepal, a Gelugpa monastery, that is involved
with doing what is known as sadhana practice for a fellow monk who had died. The practice they do
is the practice that monk had done during what was the last part of his lifetime. It is a practice of
exposing and developing inherent wisdoms. They practice what the dead person had practiced.
His practice was the one that all meditation practice is about: acknowledging, exposing,
developing, and cultivating inherent wisdom. That is what happens when we die, they say; in the
sense that the process of dying and the process of being dead, in some kind of slow motion, re-
evokes the qualities of wisdom that reside within our human body and our human life.
When we say wisdoms we are not talking about the eternal wisdoms that may or may not come
to us; we are talking about the wisdoms that are fundamentally within us. Just as the physical body
dies, disintegrates, decomposes, and is reduced down to bare bones, bare marrow into fluid, fluid
into heat, heat into air, and air into space, so too does mind dissolve. As it does so, it reveals the
basic elements that comprise mind. And those basic elements are basic wisdoms. So just as the
physical body reveals its elemental, component, atomic structure, so does mind. And it reveals
these in rather sequential order. They are known only by a quality of vision that occurs.
They are basically hallucinations, but are different from what we call hallucinations in the bardo
of life, the bardo of the human realm, that we are in right now. We use the word hallucination in the
human realm to mean a sense of confusion about what is real and what is not real. Somehow,
whenever we look carefully, analytically, at anyone’s hallucination—our own or another
person’s—we see there is a tremendous quality of imagination at work. And depending on how
much we know about them or us, we can see that very strong elements of reality of that person’s
life are coming into play in the hallucination. While other aspects of the hallucination seem to be
totally manufactured, wished for, as some sort of a dream fulfillment or hope come true. But in the
case of the process of dying, the hallucination is real. What we hallucinate is down to the elements
that expose themselves. So we hallucinate wisdom. And we hallucinate all the wisdoms, one after
the other, and then all at once—as if we did not have enough. One after the other, and then all at
once. It is difficult to say much about the wisdoms because they are non-conceptual.

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 Hallucinations make their appearance in visual form because we are visual animals. Our visual
system predominates no matter where we go and no matter what we do. Visual perception is
overriding everything and setting the imprint on how we think about anything. So the wisdoms
take form. We are separated from a body and our mind is unleashed to do as it will. Without
reference point, without anchor, without touchstone to the earth, the water quality, or even the air
quality of any kind. Mind is shaved off of that. Once again, the analogy of the dream comes up. It
is something similar to that, but it is far beyond the dream. We could say while we sit doing
meditation practice, our body is still—and in some sense our mind, because of that, can be related
to more directly than when we are rushing about. When we fall asleep and dream, the body is
ninety percent paralyzed, as if curare had been injected immediately into our veins. Muscle tone
is nowhere to be found, certainly from the head to the mid-chest and then only a slight amount
from there down. And mind unleashed from body produces dreams, which when we look at them
carefully, still have a slight connection with the body and the outside world. Telephones are
ringing, alarm clocks are making noises, and dreams weave that in. They take count of those, but
nevertheless dreams produce a completely other reality that we have no doubt about.
The process of dying is a quantum leap beyond this kind of separation. As what we call mind
dissolves, the wisdoms emerge. Just as earth, water, fire, and air emerge as the body dissolves, the
wisdoms emerge as mind dissolves. And those are said to be five wisdoms, which we have plenty
of places to read about. They are the wisdom of all-encompassing space that appears in the visual form
of Vairochana and his retinue. Following that, the wisdom of Vajrasattva, or mirror-like wisdom, and
his retinue. Following that, the wisdom of equanimity. Following that, the wisdom of discriminating
awareness. And then the wisdom of all-accomplishing action after that. And then all of them appear at
once, with all their friends and retinues. The wisdoms appear in visual, hallucinatory forms, then
they breakdown, teardown. It is like taking down the campground, stake by stake. It is because
inherent wisdom exists, ordinarily unknown to us, that practices can be recommended for us, that
the connection can be made.

Wisdom Lights and Fearlessness

It is said that in the process of recognizing these wisdoms, enlightenment could be attained. But
that is not such an easy task—and, in fact, we do not know what enlightenment is, anyway. The
simplest definition of enlightenment that we have heard and that makes some sense to us could be

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that there is an exit from the six realms of existence that we talked about in the last session. It is
said it is possible not to have to constantly revolve, circle through, the six realms of existence. There
is something other than that available to us. At the time of death, something else is immediately
available to us. It is an opportune crisis time from which we could leap out of the six realms of
existence. Into what? We do not know what, but anything is better than that. When we say “leap
out of the six realms of existence,” there seems to be risk involved with that, and some kind of fear.
It is like the experience that takes place in our meditation practice between the dissolving of oneself
with the out-breath and the next out-breath.
What happens then? There is a world that happens then. It might be whole worlds of existence,
or non-existence, that happen then. So, we might pay attention to that phase of our meditation
practice. But we should be clear that when we go out with the out-breath and dissolve into space
that accommodates the air from the bellows of our body, that that is real. We should actually
identify with that breath and dissolve, evaporate, into the atmosphere. My suspicion is that aspect
of the practice is not paid as much attention to as it might be. I have given meditation instruction
to people who will, right at that point, say, “Not on your life am I going do that” and stop
meditation practice. But, in terms of the teachings we are talking about here, that is an interesting
thing to pay ever-so-slightly more attention to. No big project. Turn the attention, a little bit more,
to what happens between identifying with your breath and dissolving into the atmosphere and
what happens next. Watch carefully because it seems to be that much of the Tibetan Book of the Dead
happens during that phase of our practice.
It is there that fear arises. It is there that the text says the fear arises in terms of the
hallucinations. The brilliant blue lights of Vairochana; the magnificent piercing and penetrating
white lights of Akshobhya; the rich and almost intolerably fertile yellow lights of Ratnasambhava;
the incredible, almost penetrating, red lights of Amitabha; the green, brilliant lights of
Amoghasiddhi. Piercing, brilliant lights radiate from the heart-centers of the hallucinations and
strike us in our heart centers. Our first response is a reflexive turning away. What we turn away
toward is the simultaneous existence of the soft, pastel, Laura Ashley–like lights that beckon and
seduce us into the six realms. They are always there to pick you up, to catch you. So there is the
simultaneous arising of these lights. Let us not make such a big deal out of the lights—that is all
that is available to mind totally separated and unleashed from body. In dreams, we have visions,
occasionally hear things, and less occasionally feel things. In the rare dream, once a year, we may

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have extreme taste or smell, but otherwise it is made up of lights and images. Even more so when
we are mind without anything remotely like body, except our imaginary body that comes purely
from memory. Everything is happening in lights, images, and occasional bursts of sound. So, we
are relating to lights. We can be fearful of these lights or we can be totally tranquilized by lights.
There are consequences if we go toward the dim lights and there are consequences if we go toward
brilliant lights, and not shy away.
So the book is about not shying away, not being shy. It is about not being afraid to meditate in
front of a whole group of people, not being fearful of lights that seem to penetrate our existence.
The book is about fear and fearlessness, and has within it the basic, fundamental, core instructions
that exist within the Buddhist teachings about fear and fearlessness, of which there are many. At
the point of Buddha’s death, one story goes, he turned to his close companion, Ananda, and said,
“This whole thing that we have been doing for the past forty-five years or so is about fearlessness.
Dharma is fearlessness.” There are many descriptions of his last words, but certainly this is one of
them. “Dharma is fearlessness.” The Tibetan Book of the Dead is also about fearlessness, which seems
to be an important ingredient of awakening. One has to conquer fear to wake up.

Practice for Death: Recognize and Rest

So you might watch the period of dissolving into space and the appearance of fear. This little
meditation practice that we do takes ten minutes to transmit to another person, but it has so many
different facets to it that it leaves not the minutest second out of what to do at any moment of time.
All the Buddhist teachings and all of the thousands and millions of pages of text come from that
little practice. The practice we transmit at Naropa, our particular style of that, comes directly from
Gampopa, who simplified the existing Buddhist practices of his time in the 12th century. He
recommended that the lineage that followed him, the lineage of Milarepa, and the others, do this
particular stripped down, bare bones practice that accomplishes everything. He called it “mixing
mind and thoughts and space.” That mixing is accomplished in various stages of shamatha-
vipashyana, or mindfulness-awareness, meditation practice and the Tibetan Book of the Dead has been,
and could be, reconstructed entirely from that practice.31

31. Chögyam Trungpa, as founder of Naropa University, was a holder of this meditation lineage of “mixing mind
and space,” and the Naropa community adopted this style of meditation. Here Ed places significance on this
particular aspect of the meditation practice—of identifying with the outbreath—for being able to understand the
psychology of transitions that he is presenting. As Chögyam Trungpa explained:

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 As anybody who has glimpsed this text knows, there are many, many other practices that are
involved, that are recommended, at different points of the stages of the process of dying. Then
specifically, how to relate to the intensity of wisdom that makes its appearance in the organic
hallucinations that will happen. All those hallucinations, by the way, were mentioned in the film
from earlier. In the practice that was done while the body was prepared and then burned, all the
wisdoms were named, shown, and demonstrated. So even in this particular community of
practitioners, they did not read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as far as one can tell from the film I’m
recommending, but they do this particular sadhana practice, which is tantamount to the same
thing. It is a showing of the wisdoms. And just like all the recommendations for how to be with a
dying person, the sangha practitioner-friends of the dying person in the film do just that. They
show the hallucinatory experience that was bound to be happening to the dead person by virtue of
their living those hallucinations.
In the same way, we could be with a dying person and have some quality of identification with
that person. Some kind of feeling and respect, perhaps awe, for what they are experiencing. And
by maintaining an environment and an atmosphere—both literally, physically, and
environmentally in terms of our own mind—we could make it possible for them to be fearless.
Every principle about being among dying people is related to how to conduct ourselves properly
so that they can conduct themselves properly. There are manners and decorum that are involved.
Those manners involve mindfulness and awareness. That decorum is creating a space where
fearlessness and recognition of the hallucinations that are occurring could take place properly. That
such hallucinations are not enemies, in spite of their brilliance, and they are not anything to be
worried about. They are not even anything to be thought about or to be afraid of.
The possibility in the hallucinations presented in the Tibetan Book of the Dead is that they are so
piercing that they could pierce beyond thought. But one has to know that, one has to have some
confidence so as not to turn away in fear and spend the rest of one’s hallucinatory time being
chased by wild animals. The experience of bardo—as mind breaks down into its component,
elemental, and visual aspects—could be extremely frightening, but that is not entirely necessary.

The basic technique that goes with sitting meditation is working with the breath. You identify with the breath,
particularly with the outbreath. The inbreath is just a gap, a space. During the inbreath you just wait. So you
breathe out and then you dissolve and then there is a gap. Breathe out … dissolve … gap. An openness, an
expansion can take place constantly that way. (Garuda IV: The Foundations of Mindfulness 1976, 23–24.) —J. Fortuna

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Good practice beforehand, and good companionship while it is taking place, could make that
whole thing much easier.
A major practice, as we hear in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a simple phrase called “recognize
and rest.” If one catalogued the practices that occur within these sixty pages, there might wind up
to be a hundred or more, but basic to all of them is “recognize and rest.” So we should figure out
what that means. There are many different aspects to it, but this is instruction being given to the
person who is entering this world of visions. So recognize the visions as the appearance of your
own mind inverting. It is like taking a hold of it, reaching into your pocket, and pulling it inside
out. Do you follow me? Your mind is being pulled inside out. What was, so to speak, unconscious
is now visual form before your eyes. What has been forgotten memory is now the consequences of
those memories appearing in front of your eyes. The visual system primarily is taking the brunt of
all of this while you are being turned inside out. Just as your body is being stripped to its elemental
form, your mind is being stripped to its basic foundations. The wisdoms appear. And rest means to
rest, relax; so recognize, rest, relax; recognize . . . over and over again. Recognize that the visions
that appear are only the inside out of what you are made up of from beginning to the end. Rest
confident in that. Do not have fear about that. Do not be chased by your own hallucinations. Do
not make a nightmare out of the best aspects of yourself. Relax, recognize, and rest, is “rest in the
nature of that vision.” Rest in the nature of those lights, which is the basic luminosity. These visions
occur out of silence and emptiness, out of nothing left. And the nature of these visions is, again, the
fundamental luminosity that is the neutral, basic energy of human life, and other lives.
If you don’t recognize and rest, then other things happen. Then there is the appearance of the
wrathful deities. It is just like at school when the teacher said, “I’ve been telling you over and over
and over again, if you don’t get it this time, you’re going to have to stay after school.” That seems
to be the nature of these visions—they give us every conceivable opportunity to recognize the
emptying out and exposing of mind from inside out. That wakeful, neutral energy appears as very
peaceful and magnificent, and as the glory of our inherent state. But if we laze out and ignore that,
then the same visions appear with shock. The awakened, neutral energy comes now in wrathful
form. And every one of the wrathful visions is still related to every one of the peaceful visions of
wisdom energy, but now they are somewhat menacing. They are more wakeful and ruthless and
slashing—but they are the same energy.

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 And then the process of re-birth begins to happen, whatever that means; coming out of the
elemental forms, visual forms, colors, images, then experience begins to take solid form again. Just
as when we awaken from a dream. The visual (or dream of this scenario) begins to come apart,
break down into lights, rays, and colored images of incoherent forms. That breaks down into
pulsating light, and then that breaks down into a form of white light, and then we begin to awaken.
And as we awaken, we take form all over again. So, it is the same thing.
But the basic practice, throughout all of this, is to recognize and rest. Recognize what?
Recognize what we have been talking about; recognize what you were able to recognize from a
lifetime of meditation practice. Recognize the best you can and relax. Immovably relax. Fearlessly
relax. To the degree that we recognize the nature of our projections, through meditation practice
and post meditation practice, it is to that degree, exactly (“measure for measure,” as they say) that
we will recognize the hallucinations as just coming from our own stuff. Our own good stuff. Measure
for Measure—I suppose that whole Shakespeare play is about the teachings of karma, one way or
another.
Well, we could go on for a long time, but time is wearing down and we should stop so that we
have time for a few questions.

Student: Before taking birth, when one is making a mess of things in terms of ignorance and
there is a lot of slashing and hounding of wild animals and it is terrifying; wrathful deities are
terrifying one. In what way is such a state different from being in a hell realm, which would be
aggression everywhere. The heat of that, the fear of that, and the striking out at that. What is the
difference?
Ed: I think the difference depends on one’s capabilities of really recognizing the menacing and
wrathful images that have come out of oneself in the bardo of becoming. It could be made very
clear that they are coming out of oneself, that they are the reciprocal or inversions or consequences
of memories or unfortunate accidents of action that one committed and never quite forgot. It is
possible to recognize that is where they are coming from. In terms of a hell realm, it is more being
absolutely overwhelmed and chased by the demons that do not have all that much connection to
oneself. They are a total enemy. I suppose the whole thing could become a total enemy and the
whole thing could become a hell realm. But there seems to be more possibility, in terms of these
teachings about the bardo of becoming and taking form—whether it is taking form after dying, or
taking form upon waking up from a dream, or taking form after getting off your meditation

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cushion: rising from the cushion and walking around—that one could be taking form in any realm
at that moment. There is at least the possibility that there is more awareness that could be brought
to the situation than in the hell realm, at least in the most intense degrees of the hell ream, where
awareness seems to be so unreachable.
S: It is much more hopeless, so to speak?
Ed: I think so. And it requires the activity (the action) of human presence, strong human
presence, during hell realm, which might be the connection. But it is said that otherwise, other
than that, there is none. There is no hope whatsoever. Even Buddha cannot save you from the hell
realm. But here we are talking about it in terms of bardo and in terms of the six realms of existence
and this bardo right now, that we have the wherewithal to recognize where our enemies are coming
from. And they are the same old thing. They are coming out of our fear of recognizing the
brilliance, trepidation.

Student: Could you say a little bit more about hallucinations taking place as a person is dying?
You seem to say that these hallucinations occur before the moment of death and that recognizing
can happen as a person is dying. Is that true?
Ed: As a person is dying?
S: Yes, as.
Ed: Yes, depending on what you can recognize, remember; so it is not just making it up on the
spot. It depends on what you can re-cognize: what you can bring from what you learned before
into the present situation. You have to be able to have the awareness to make that link between
previous learning and what is happening now. What is happening when one is dying will be all
kinds of visual and auditory phenomena as the earth element dissolves into the water element, and
the water element into . . . Each one of those are said to be accompanied by outstanding
experiential phenomena dominating one’s consciousness. A state of absolute panic could arise then.
Or one’s watchful recognizing could happen then. And you are still alive. You are still technically,
medically speaking, alive as that is happening. And that is just the beginning, right? That is just for
starters. That is just like an LSD trip. That has not even hit the beginning. So, you definitely have
to have your wits about you to recognize and rest. That is why it is traditionally said that there is
this narrator or friend who will remind you and show you. I think we should never forget the
importance of that kind of reminder, in human form, in human presence. We often need gentle
reminders in even the most ordinary situation. A person who is dying cannot ask for help. No way

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that they can reach out for help. So we shouldn’t take that for granted—that human presence as a
reminder. Practicing along with the person who is dying is of extraordinary importance in their
being able to stabilize their own mind.

Student: How does that experience modify in our culture where a lot of people are heavily
medicated at the point of death?
Ed: It seems to be a big problem. Yes. I think we probably do not even know how big a problem
it really is and it depends on the medication. Frankly, I would not, myself, want to be on Thorazine
at the time I die.
S: I was thinking primarily of morphine.
Ed: Morphine. I suppose then it is somewhat dose related. If it is to the degree where the
consciousness is clouded, where your awareness is difficult to come by, where you cannot hear
reminders, then it is just causing you more trouble. I remember when my mother was dying, and
it seemed like she was going to be in extreme pain as she was approaching that point, I was looking
all over for raw opium. I had telephone calls out to the West Coast and East Coast in order to
avoid synthetic pain medications, which would interfere with her awareness.

Student: How relevant are the Tathagatas, the different deities in the bardo state, to persons of
other traditions? Would there be different kinds of deities instead, or would you even have deities
appearing to you?
Ed: Maybe. Maybe you would recognize what you have trained in, cognized.
S: What do you mean?
Ed: You would recognize what you have learned and what you have practiced beforehand.
S: In other words, a person growing up in the Christian tradition would see Christian
iconography, or something like that?
Ed: I do not know. If there were a particular training about hallucinations in that tradition,
they might recognize that. What a Sioux Native American sees at the time of death, I do not know,
but what is unchanging are the elements of mind breaking up into lights and rays and colored
images. How one reforms that is another story. And if one has not been given any training
whatsoever in that, then they could turn out to be anybody’s nightmare.

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 I want to thank you all very much for sitting with this difficult material. As many of you know,
it is said that just hearing these teachings changes your life. Even if you do not understand them and
you hear them, it changes your life. It is just one of those kinds of books that exist in this world
where just coming into contact with the text itself will have beneficial effects on how you live and
how you die. I hope very much that you benefited from this and that whatever benefit you did get,
that you will use that energy to help yourselves and to help other people.

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 Endnotes

i. Fortuna, Jeffrey. “Dreaming and Psychopathology” notes, 1985. Unpublished manuscript.

Boulder, CO.

ii. Lippmann, Paul. Nocturnes: On Listening to Dreams, 2000, 236. New York, NY: The Analytic
Press.

iii. Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, 1960, xiii. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.

iv. Freud, Sigmund, The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy, 1961. J. Strachey, ed. and
trans. “The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud” (Vol.
11, 144–151). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1910).

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