Another Motion Picture: Non-Attachment as Enlightenment or Mental Illness?

It's another motion picture,

Maybe a miniseries,

And you don't have to ask who is the star.

It's shot in living color

In surround-sound

Audi-uh-oh on location where you are.

The shooting crew's inside your head.

They run the film unedited.

The budget won't allow reshooting scenes.

It's rated R, X, and PG,

A comic, tragic mystery,

And its up to you to figure out what it means.

The rumor is the author's dead.

The director shouting in your head

Is under the impression it's all a dream.

It's self-indulgent, the critics say,

Too much improv, too much play

Of light across nostalgic, static screens.

It's another motion picture,

Maybe a miniseries,

And you don't have to ask who is the star.

It's shot in living color

In surround-sound

Audi-uh-oh on location where you are.

Since I wrote "Another Motion Picture" in the 1990s, I've sung it and asked if audience members ever felt like life was a movie they were in, and no hands went up. Some looks suggested that it's a rare state, even a crazy one, but it's based on my own experience.

Often dissociation is pleasant, a sense of being alive in a moment worth savoring. Around 1960, when Greyhound Scenicruisers were nicer than airliners today--coaches that people dressed up to ride--I was on the windowed upper deck on my first such solo trip away from home and recall a movie-like sense of delight and wonder that I was there, somewhere in east Texas as a vast, alien landscape dollied by behind glass. It was a sense of "this can't be me." 

        A little later, I felt a similar framing on an iron-filigreed balcony off Rampart Street in New Orleans, staring at antique chimneys over the rooftops as big-city sirens wailed in the distance. Like film, it printed and is printed still. Early sexual experiences were similarly dissociated--imprinted in alien detail--in this case with tactile benefits. More recently, riding from Heathrow on my virginal trip to England, I saw out the the taxi window clips from PBS. Freud reported a similar experience of unreality when he visited the Acropolis. It might be fairly common.

Of course, dissociation isn't always pleasant, especially when it lasts for days. It may accompany depression. I remember winter weeks when I was eighteen and the world seemed to drift away. People floated as if behind aquarium glass, images in an airless world beyond touch. I felt powerless to approach anyone, barely able speak. What would I say? Then one evening I dragged myself into the Barney's Cub, a cafe on College Street where friends seldom hung out, and a booth of acquaintances called me to sit with them. They knew me. My tongue was loosed. The glass between the world and me dissolved. Clearly, I had suffered a mental episode, a bout of depressed alienation that I dreaded to repeat. Today, I take St. John's Wort as blues insurance, but, through the decades, it seems that marriage, family, pets, work, and theatre have kept the aquarium glass dissolved.

  There's a name for this kind of mental lapse. It's a subset of dissociative disorder called depersonalization-derealization disorder. The Mayo Clinic describes it as "an ongoing or episodic sense of detachment or being outside yourself — observing your actions, feelings, thoughts and self from a distance as though watching a movie (depersonalization). Other people and things around you may feel detached and foggy or dreamlike, time may be slowed down or sped up, and the world may seem unreal (derealization)." This can be distressing and may interfere with social functioning, which is why it's called a disorder.

But there is a paradox here. On a weekend retreat at Yogaville, an ashram in Virginia, the Saturday evening speaker preached that life is like a movie in which we are characters. Our choices do matter within the world of light on the screen because that is where those choices are. They too are light on that screen that we naively experience as real, but they are ultimately flickering of shadows soon to fade to nothing but traces affecting future shows. We torture ourselves by mistaking the life-movie for reality rather than a surface we're called to grow beyond. Only in seeing the eternal screen that reflects the transient flicker can we find real peace--and maybe more than peace, maybe even sublime happiness and eternal truth.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism agree that the ego and its experiences are removed from absolute reality but sustained by it much as actors, lights, sets, cameras, a projector, and a screen sustain the movie but don't exist in its flickering light. The goal of much Eastern religion is to apprehend, chiefly through mediation and right action, the hidden ground that sustains the illusion (often called Maya) that we are separate selves--that we are bodies with memories and experiences. Illuminated souls see themselves as continuous with God or the Divine Ground: undivided parts of a single, supreme, eternal, indescribable, changeless reality. 

Realized mystics view the shadow-world of personal ego and its experiences with non-attachment, as a passing show or lucid dream even as they continue to function within it. The great Taoist teacher, Chuang Tzu, waking from a dream that he was a butterfly, wondered if he might be a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu (p. 20). Even the Christian mystic Eckhart preached escape from suffering by striving "to shed our own form and the forms of all creatures, knowing no father but God alone" (p. 58).

It seems that, if you are an illuminated mystic, you dissociate from your ego, body, and life experience. In the words of the Mayo Clinic's definition of dissociative disorders, you experience a sense of being detached from yourself and your emotions and a perception of the people and things around you as distorted and unreal. The paradox is that identical words describe nirvana and mental illness, an Eastern good and a Western evil. Surely, the two aren't identical. I'd never confuse my mood those winter weeks when I was eighteen with nirvana, quite the opposite. Returning to ego-entanglement, to Maya, felt like an enlightenment. 

        Definitions of disorders anticipate this kind of ambiguity by tacking on a final criteria: Your symptoms cause you significant stress or problems in your relationships, work or other important areas of your life. In other words, even if you're a space cadet, that may not be a disorder if it doesn't bother you. My dissociation at eighteen was a disorder because I felt disordered. This pragmatic circular distinction may work in medical fields, but it hardly explains the paradox. How can non-attachment define both enlightenment and disease?

I think that some degree of dissociation or non-attachment to material goals and the hungry ego indeed promotes happy life. Pleasure, power, comfort, wealth, love, reputation, and health are transitory, and, even as they persist, they are subverted by the hedonic treadmill, the ego's blind hunger for more. We run, like Alice, to stand still. We, the living, want endless life, but only by desperate denial can we forget our deaths. Pascal makes a valid point (even absent his assurance of eternal life) that, if our best answer to mortality is to distract ourselves with diversions, we are in a sorry state (132-139). Buddhists call this state duhkha, often translated "suffering" but perhaps more like dissatisfaction, the unhappiness of a man's not knowing "how to sit quietly in his room" (Pascal, 136). Satisfaction and peace come only by accepting the experience of self in the world as ultimately unreal. Contentment is living at a sane remove from life--in the world but not addicted to it. Even without expecting the ecstatic detachment of an Eastern sage, we can understand that seeking contentment by gratifying the ego-driven senses is chasing a phantom.

Circularity may explain the paradox. If we travel halfway around the world in opposite directions, we end up at the same place. But, at the end of the journey (before motorized transportation anyway--a better metaphor for life), travelers would see the same country framed very differently by their long travels. Heaven and Hell are often imagined as the same divine presence experienced by receptive and non-receptive souls. Perhaps dissociation and non-attachment are the same place and differ because of a person's receptivity--or, metaphorically, the road traveled to teach at it. Even if opposites are not identical, they may feel similar. Deep red and violet have like intensity and edge ends of the spectrum into black. Political true believers at the extreme left and right share a desire to overthrow the status quo but come to this from opposite directions.

Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, his account of a pupil's successful road to illumination under the guidance of a guru, is described on the cover as "timeless teachings on nonduality," which is the doctrine that the separate identity of things in the world is ultimately unreal. Shankara seems to present nonduality as an outcome, not a goal in itself. Simple blindness to duality in the world would be disordered. Within the movie of life, the guru still sees his body and things in the world as separate (however transitory) events. Otherwise he would run into doors. The goal, detachment from the reality of things, is attained through discipline (one of Shankara's favorite terms) to achieve identification with an absolute ground, after which the nonduality seems obvious. Non-attachment may be false except as the outcome of a Dante-like journey. Perhaps the resemblance between nirvana and dissociative mental disorders is like the opposing resemblance between red and violet.

Perhaps, but I wonder. It's not unreasonable to suppose that dissociation might give us a leg up toward nonduality. Maybe the insistence that it dead-ends into mental disease is a result of Western materialism. Maybe I might have benefited from a handy guru when I was eighteen. 

Works Cited

Chaung Tzu. The Book of Chaung Tzu. Translated by Martin Palmer. Penguin Books, 2006.

"Dissociative Disorders." Mayo Clinic. www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-disorders/symptoms-causes/syc-20355215 

Eckhart. Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings. Translated Oliver Davies. Penguin Books, 1994.

Freud, Sigmund. "A Disturbance of Memory at the Acropolis (1936)." Freud2Lacan, contributed by Richard Klein, www.freud2lacan.com/docs/A_Disturbance_of_Memory.pdf 

Pascal, Blase. Pensees. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. Penguin, 1995.

Shankara. Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Translated by Swami Prabhavanda and Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press, 1975.