Thoughts without a thinker Book

While many years of therapy that involved delving back into a horrendous childhood and service in 3 wars helped me to identify the issues it did not help me to deal with them. The process of ego splitting that is the crucial point for both therapy and Buddhist practice just never happened for me. It would have been helpful if the therapists I had had contact with could have told me and shown me what we were aiming for.

A bit much to ask for, given the perceived wisdom prevailing during the 80's and 90's, but certainly a Mark Epstein would have been a godsend. A psychiatrist and practising Buddhist who understood the process of the journey I found myself on and what Buddhism and meditation offered could have saved me a great deal of suffering with some judicious guidance.

This book fell into my hands at a time when I felt beyond human help and trapped. The deep change necessary for the resolution of my problems had just not occurred. In retrospect I had had the sense that nothing was complete and while form was changed the demons now known, seen and felt were still there. I was them!

The hospitals and psychiatrists treating the war related trauma just kept me trapped in that sense of who I was. I just couldn't break free. It seemed that they had no real idea what to do with what they had brought to the surface and I was certainly not equipped to do anything with it. I was lost in the mind numbing, soul destroying cycle of alcohol,antidepresdsants and hospitalization.

Given my experience now I would have every practising psychiatrist and mental health professional in the west read this little book. What it did for me was to take a newly emergent exploration of Buddhism as a way forward out of the nightmare of depression and addiction and confirm it as true north. It gave me faith that what was beginning to happen for me was understandable in terms and contexts I knew and was in fact the way forward for me. It provided a road map.

The only issue I would want to raise is that the first time I started this book, Epstein's slightly arcane approach through the analogy of the wheel of life obscured the value of what he had to say. I also found in reading it through that my understanding and experience of psychology and psychotherapy were invaluable. I would have been a bit lost without them. I also found that I really needed some understanding if not experience of Buddhist practice to make the most of the book. It helped set me on the path with conviction.

Notwithstanding, I think this book must have been ground breaking when first written and thankfully what Epstein saw as a trend for collusion between traditional western psychiatry and Buddhist psychology today appears to continue.

For the sake of all troubled souls it can't happen rapidly enough.