The Zen Wisdom of Kierkegaard’s ‘Willing One Thing”
Cody Oaks, MA, LPCC
????????Duplicity or Resoluteness? ?The Zen Wisdom of Kierkegaard’s "Willing One Thing"
???????????My patient and I (let’s call him “Phil”) look at each other knowingly, but neither of us say a word. It is the beginning of another session, and I can tell we’re stuck in the same infinite loop: one session, Phil is excited; the next he is feeling depressed. Excitement, depression. Excitement, depression. Rinse, repeat. Phil and I have been at this long enough now that I can tell he has developed a process-awareness of this pattern even as he feels his immediate feelings of either hopeful optimism or defeated pessimism. Why such emotional back and forth for Phil? What is the source of his emotional rollercoaster, his samsaric whiplash?
???????????Phil is in his early 30’s and, until now, he has abandoned the already-cleared paths for career success in pursuit of his dream to be a rock star. Of course, Phil wouldn’t put it this way. On this side of the 1980’s, it is more appropriate to talk about “making a living as a musician”, but the linguistic nuances aren’t important to me: he wants to be paid a nice living for making his music, and he wants the adulation and affirmation from those in his particular music scene. Phil desperately wants to win the world, and he won’t respect himself until he does. But simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, he also cannot tolerate the feeling brought about by his ambition. Some quiet, but nevertheless abidingly present voice within him feels that happiness and contentment shouldn’t be this elusive, this topsy-turvy. But he also feels that worldly acclaim is his birthright. Not in a haughty, aggressively volatilized sense; no, he is an “enlightened” modern man after all and is much too self-deprecating and mild mannered for that. Rather, he simply harbors the common belief that if he works hard enough and is agreeable to those he deals with, things will naturally work out. After all, it worked for his parents. However, after some initial local success and “buzz” around town, the success of his band has plateaued for several years. Hence his weekly vacillation between deflated cynicism and hopeful optimism: one week looks likely that the band will get a nice write-up in a local paper, the next week his band returned from embarking on an effortful regional tour playing in front of no more than 15 attendants per night with meager compensation. But now, here we are in my psychotherapy office, and after 3 ? years of therapy with me, he knows the cycle well and is desperate to get off this awful treadmill. After all, he’s not getting any younger, and, as he confesses to me, “This is a bad look staring down the barrel of your forties”.?
???????????As a psychotherapist, I struggled mightily with this case (which is an exemplar of many such cases I encounter) and sought clinical advice in several places. My psychoanalytic colleagues encouraged me to gently lead Phil to a place where he would see that his relationship to the dialectic of frustration/gratification was too weighty- each one meant too much for him. This provided an interesting insight throughout our work, but no change. My more cognitive-behaviorally minded colleagues suggested that I work with Phil to help redefine his concept of “success”, since it seemed that his working concept was very black & white, all or nothing, which invariably led to feelings of failure. Seems logical enough, I thought, but in the clinical hour this intervention left me with the inescapable feeling that I was giving a few ibuprofen tablets for a migraine. No, what Phil needed, I concluded, was real medicine; antibiotics that would prevent Phil’s neurosis from replicating itself by situating it in a totally different frame. With some hesitation, I allowed myself to see Phil’s problem not simply as psychological, but psycho-spiritual (a decision which totally changed the way I approach the psychotherapy situation afterwards). I gave myself permission to integrate the two most inspiring sources for my own introspection: the practice of Zen Buddhism and the writings of the existential philosopher S?ren Kierkegaard; in particular, his work Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
???????????In Purity of Heart, Kierkegaard, with his customary surgical precision, provides us with a penetrating psycho-spiritual diagnosis of “Phil’s” problem. The real issue, according to Kierkegaard, is that of duplicity (or as Kierkegaard calls it, “Double-mindedness”). Duplicity, as the word implies, has certainly to do with a “double-motive”, as it is commonly understood. Understood in this way, the duplicitous person seems to be interested in one thing but is only interested in another. As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi might say, “there is something extra”. ?For instance, a retail clerk may put on a good, conscientious face at work so he or she can steal from the cash register after hours without arousing suspicion. But as in the case of “Phil” (and with most of us, I suspect), I want to suggest with Kierkegaard that duplicity need not be that insidious. This is an important point. In Phil’s case, his duplicity lies in the fact that he wants to win the world, but he never stopped to ask himself if this was good (as Kierkegaard says); or as Buddhists might say: wholesome (benefitting the larger “whole).
???????????As the title suggests, for Kierkegaard, purity of heart (which Phil rarely experienced) is not to be in a duplicitous state of being, but rather to “will one thing”. What, for Kierkegaard, is the “one thing” to be willed? Answer: The good. As Kierkegaard explains in a most doxological fashion: “the good is unconditionally the one and only thing that a person may will and shall will, and is only one thing. O blessed brevity, blessed the simplicity that swiftly grasps what sagacity, weary in the service of vanity, slowly comprehends! (p. 25)”. When a person wills the good, duplicity and “ontological dissonance”; the feeling of trying to be too many things, are overcome. When a person wills one thing, then there is “purity of heart”. I want to state very clearly that “purity of heart” for Kierkegaard has nothing to do with a kind of moralistic Victorian-like chastity. Remarkably, Kierkegaard’s use of “purity” here denotes something very akin to the common Zen usage. It is more like “straightforwardness” or “single-pointed mind-heart”. ?It's pointing to a serene simplicity full of irrevocable joy, purpose, and intention. Ontological dissonance (or the subjective feeling resulting from the illusion of subject/object divide) is overcome, because to “will the good” means, for Kierkegaard, to “draw near to God”, the ground of Being, the wellspring of all Good. Purity of heart means to relate directly with universal activity with right effort. Conversely, duplicity leads us away from willing the good, which in turn leads us away from our true nature. When this happens, like my patient Phil we experience “symptoms”: depression, anxiety, unstable moods, irritability, or a general unease with ourselves (dukkha).
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???????????How do we, like Phil, get in this mess? Why do we so often cash in the serenity, joy, peace, and a securely fortified sense of purpose for the distracted, anxious, emotionally labile experience of duplicity? According to Kierkegaard, this is because we get too caught up in “rewards”, or as we might say, outcomes; particularly outcomes which are favorable to our cherished sense of so-called “self”. When we engage in human activity (which is forever ongoing), we are basically presented with two choices or “roads” as Kierkegaard calls them; there is the road that leads to “the good” and the road that moves toward “rewards” or outcomes. The road that leads to the good cannot guarantee any particular outcome, it must be chosen and practiced for its own sake. In this case, the outcomes are in the hands of the universe. There is a kind of surrender combined with strong, focused intention. The other road, the road that looks to rewards, is concerned with the interests of ego. It is playing ego’s game; this road objectifies the world to build up and affirm an idealized image of oneself. You might say that this road, strictly speaking, is narcissistically organized.
???????????Kierkegaard, in his genius for the human soul, won’t let us deceive ourselves this easily, however. He knows that for most of us, the self-deception goes much deeper, it’s more nuanced and sophisticated. Much like “Phil”, most of us have enough decency not to be honest, straight-forward narcissists. So, in our subtle duplicity, we posit a “third” road where we can seem to be willing the good, engaging in straight-forward activity, with “nothing extra”, but deep in our hearts, we truly wish for rewards. As Kierkegaard puts it, this third road “has no name since it does not exist at all, and thus it is explainable that he, especially if he is to be honest, cannot say which road he is taking. If he is to be honest, since otherwise he certainly would declare that he is taking the road of the good, he would of course attach great importance to convincing people of it- so that they could honor him, which is part of the reward to which he aspires. The third road is the secret he keeps to himself (p. 41)”.
???????????As we might say in Zen, notice how this person’s volitional/decisional/concentrative process lacks sincerity. “He” is not really honest with himself about the nature of intention. He knows enough to know that he is supposed to seem to will the good with single-minded effort, but he harbors a secret belief that he can pursue both: he can will the good for it’s own sake and strive after outcomes. Kierkegaard knows that the true nature of the human heart-mind makes no compromises here, thus he says this third road “has no name since it doesn’t exist at all”. It is illusory. What a sad situation for our greedy hearts! If we are to grow and mature in our deepest sense, we truly must choose one or the other. But perhaps the significantly important first step is to wake up to the reality of our own illusion; the illusion that we can cheat and do both. We have to let go of our own duplicity.
???????????The road we choose will greatly determine our view towards our lives; in fact, it will determine how we view life itself. The road of rewards and outcomes (along with the duplicitous and illusory “third road”) will necessarily lead to a narrow view. As Pema?Ch?dr?n might say, “we can regard our life as a movie in which we are temporarily the leading player”. Many of us have heard the expression: “be careful what you wish for, you just may get it”. This points to the disillusion we feel when we have been journeying down this road and when we get the reward we secretly long for, but it doesn’t fulfill us as much as we thought. Actually, I want to suggest that this feeling of disillusionment is not necessarily because there is anything inherently “bad” or “wrong” with the reward we strove after. It’s not the fault of your new job or your newly minted academic degree that you are disappointed. You don’t need to “go bigger” with the rewards you seek. Maybe the disillusion we feel is the result of the whole economy of grasping/reward-seeking energy. It disappoints because it’s not the real reality of universal life-energy. But boy, does it glitter and shine.
???????????Once we have woken up to our own self-deception and how we try to take the illusory “third road”, we are in a wonderful position. This means we can actually start to practice walking on the road which wills the good, the road which participates in life-energy for its own sake, the road that just sits, just makes a cup of tea, just listens to a friend or a patient, just drives a car, just walks in the woods and smiles at the moon in the evening winter sky. Our view begins to enlarge, it becomes more “panoramic” as Ch?gyam Trungpa Rinpoche?used to say. We do this very imperfectly. If we are practicing our walk down this road, we very often drift off and stumble off to the side, thinking we are on the imaginary third road. Others do it too, so it makes the third road feel real, as if it is an option (see Kierkegaard’s “The Crowd is Untruth” for a deeper discussion of this). If we have some intuitive intelligence, or a teacher, therapist, or good friend, they may remind us to join them on the road which wills the good. We will often join them again and proceed on this road. Why? It is not because we are attracted to rewards or outcomes, since that would mean getting off of this road and going down the only other available road. No, we join them because we sense their care. We might not be conscious of it, but we feel something very important: care as the essential life-energy. It doesn’t always glitter and shine, but it just feels right, it feels essential, like coming home. As Suzuki Roshi said, “Zen is making your best effort in each moment forever”, or as the dharma of Kierkegaard might say, “purity of heart is to will one thing”. So let us not become entangled with writing our own autobiographies with our lives, but as one Zen teacher would say, take part in “taking care of the whole works” together.
Cody Oaks, MA, LPCC is the Clinical Director and psychotherapist at Northeast Psychotherapy in Minneapolis, MN and is a Zen practitioner in the lineage of Dainin Katagiri Roshi.
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