Chapters 1 - 10
1. A Moment of Truth
Many will remember, the year was 2006, when the author James Frey became America’s national distraction, his visage to be found glimmering nightly on the evening news, sandwiched between stories of the war in Iraq and Iran’s nuclear ambition. There was Iraq, Iran, and James Frey.
A website called The Smoking Gun had called Frey out, for fabricating certain events of his life in his bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. This may not have mattered much, save for the fact that no less a personage than Oprah Winfrey had selected the book for her Book Club of eponymous name. In so doing, she had taken the first time author under her considerably sized wing.
When Oprah confronted Frey in front of her national audience, millions watched, enrapt, as he sat quietly, surprised and bewildered, unable to do much but suffer the humiliation.
At this particular moment in history, the country’s President, it had become clear, had rallied the nation to war on false pretense. But the lie the people found beyond the pale was that of the memoirist.
At the time, the irony went unnoticed.
The nation had had a moment of Truth, but what was this Truth found?
2. The Fury
Frey’s story of a drug and alcohol riddled young man determined to overcome the power of his addiction, refusing a prescribed (twelve-step) path, choosing instead to forge his own way, resonated with addicts, their families, and non-addicts alike.
A profound reflection on the nature of addiction, A Million Little Pieces got right to the root of addiction, which Frey called “the Fury.” That feeling that we all, to some degree or another, have inside us. The feeling that things are not okay. Everything is not okay. Something is wrong. Something hurts. Something gnaws. Something terrifies.
For the addict in Frey’s book, the Fury ravishes and rampages, as a darkness feeding, disturbing peace, preventing joy, requiring, needing, needing, needing. How to stop the Fury? For Frey’s character, feed it drugs, feed it alcohol. Quench it. Make it go away.
Stop the Fury.
The Fury: is precisely “the Horror” that Joseph Conrad wrote of in The Heart of Darkness, to which Brando gives voice in Apocalypse Now.
The Horror: the emptiness, fear, pain, anxiety, loneliness that sits within, manifest as doubt, regret, self-judgement, self-hatred.
A Million Little Pieces resonated with so many because it described in vivid and often brutal fashion a dis-ease seemingly endemic to our present human condition.
I have no significance. I have no meaning. I have no value. I have nothing to contribute. I have no love.
Before he was flayed and flogged, Frey had become beloved. The meaning and power of the words he wrote were bound up not in the memoir’s events having happened or not, but in an elemental truth the story conveyed:
The Horror…
3. Let’s Call It Suffering
One need not be an addict to know the Horror. In some fashion, we’re, most every one of us, looking for, latching onto some path or paths out of various kinds of emotional pain.
So, perhaps it might be useful to soften the word a bit, to make it more accessible. Most simply, the Horror might be understood as thoughts and emotions that disturb our state of being, bring us down, take us away from the enjoyment of our lives.
Let’s call it suffering.
It’s the universal experience of suffering that Frey explored so well, which resonated so deeply.
4. Dukkha
The world’s major religions begin with, find as their foundation, the problem of suffering, each offering a framework explaining its existence.
The monotheistic triad of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam cohere in their teaching that humanity is fallen, cast from paradise, set apart (alienated) from God, in need of salvation.
Hinduism similarly instructs that humanity’s inherited state is lacking, that we must move from a life bound by illusion (maya) towards freedom in liberation (nirvana).
Daoism elucidates the “mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders,” which individual seekers must discover in order to escape the travail of a life filled with tumult and dissatisfaction.
But perhaps none so succinctly as Buddhism, whose saint and sage spoke explicitly of dukkha, a Sanskrit word commonly translated as “suffering,” “anxiety,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” “I taught,” said the Buddha, “one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha.”
Dukkha…
Let’s call the Horror…
Dukkha…
Commonly translated as…
Suffering…
Anxiety…
Unsatisfactoriness…
Dukkha.
Who can’t relate to that?
5. A Nation Opened and Vulnerable
There it lies, dukkha, at the beginning of each of the world’s major religions, unmistakably, undeniably, unavoidably.
Likewise, the psychotherapeutic traditions begin with dukkha, and prove their worth in their ability to ameliorate it. Freud, the atheist “father of psychoanalysis,” posited that religion serves as a means of returning us to an undifferentiated “oceanic feeling” of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity, which we necessarily lose as our perception develops from that of the undifferentiated infant to the ego-delineated adult.
So too for the healing arts, from massage to energy work to yoga, which seek to provide relief from the suffering and anxiety and unsatisfactoriness that persist in daily life.
And, of course, the vast psycho-pharmaceutical industry exists to provide easy palliatives to the more medicinally inclined.
The problem of dukkha, the persistence of the Horror, pointedly is why the phenomenal popularity of A Million Little Pieces was and remains so important. This culture that so prides itself on the attainment and exhibition of “happiness” fell in love with a book about its opposite, and one man’s chosen route out of it.
Through sharing his experience of dukkha, Frey opened a very large swath of the country up to recognizing, acknowledging suffering in their own lives. By feeling and expressing it himself, he gave America the okay to feel it and express it as well. And he went further, to inspire with his example of overcoming. He showed there was a Way.
When it came to light that Frey had embellished his tale, that perhaps, in fact, he had not experienced the Horror he so artfully recounted, the nation, feeling tricked and betrayed, was aghast, as if to say, “You don’t feel our pain, James?”
This was the nature of his crime.
Opened and vulnerable, a wounded populace pounced on him in a feat of collective self-protection.
But the Truth remained, and remains.
6. The Pervasiveness of Dukkha
I have been writing of dukkha as psycho-spiritual malaise, stress, anxiety, depression, anger, jealousy, resentment: negative, afflictive thoughts, emotions that distract, detract from happiness, joy.
I have yet to address more objective, physical, profound pain: the privation of food and water; extraordinary economic and social injustice; the ravage of disease; the wreckage of war; non-human suffering, of nature, of animals, the hard facts of anthropogenic climate change, accelerating pollution, the projected “sixth extinction” of species.
The tragic streams continually from varied feeds into our consciousness, all seeming somehow beyond, apart, yet still affecting, weighing upon, the knowledge of these distant sufferings slowly layering up, compounding.
To abate our own dukkha requires diligent, continued effort. To help our friends and family, more. To consider the suffering of neighbors, that much more. To contemplate the pain of strangers, of animals, of the Earth, yet that much more again.
Yet, it’s all of a part.
7. The Way of Addiction & the Way of Conformity
As Frey’s character arcs from the reactive trappings of addiction to a conscious intending to heal, overcome, we see the author weave a tale of choice. The addict, broken, a million little pieces, in crisis, faces a juncture, to continue as he has been, or to break out of his way of being, his pattern of life, to find a new route.
He’d been reacting, for years. Re-acting: acting again and again and again, as before, ingesting more alcohol, more drugs, in an attempt to quell the Horror, to ameliorate dukkha. Each day, he re-acted to escape, re-acted as a reach for solace, reprieve.
Dukkha propelled him, compelled him, which is to say, the need to escape dukkha lay at the root of his addiction.
Arrived at the Hazelton Rehabilitation Center, he finds himself prescribed a new way, a program, presented by true believers as sacrosanct, a singular choice. His path to recovery, to freedom, would involve twelve steps, no more, no less. He refuses, wanting instead to find his own way, a combining of self-discipline and self-transcendence, guided by the flowing, eternal wisdom of the Dao De Ching.
Choice, conscious, reflective or not, determines action. Such that life may be defined by choices projecting forward, and actions trailing behind. And so, in examining a life, it is important to consider, what is the motivation behind choice, as impetus to action?
In the case of Frey’s character, the energizing force driving his re-acting is dukkha. It is the animating tension within him, the energy pressing out, catalyzing, demanding. In the moment when dukkha is felt, whether as a tinge of doubt or the crush of loss, noticed vaguely or clutched acutely, comes a desire, experienced as need, to escape.
In that moment of suffering, uncertainty, unsatisfactoriness, anxiety, fear, regret, anger, jealousy, loneliness, self-doubt, self-hatred, in the movement away from these feelings, there lay a question, towards what? There, in the space between the need for escape and the answer to this what, to what?... is the moment and movement of choice.
To escape through, to, in Frey’s character’s case, drugs and alcohol, to his most deeply rutted path, taken again and again and again, re-acted again and again and again.
This is the nature of addiction, not the replacement of choice, but the default choice, known behavior re-acted, always.
The movement away from dukkha to re-acting is the Way of Addiction: to re-act without much in the way of self-control or self-determination.
It has the characteristic of a jumping, out of dukkha, into behavior well known, behavior to which a bond, a devotion has been formed, a familiarity, over time, building up. The jump happens quickly, in the slice of a moment, a leap outwards, out of, out towards a hoped for freedom, the freedom of air rushing in, of sky lifting up.
The jump grants momentary relief, but ultimately must fail, become stifled, because, by nature it remains bound, to dukkha. As a line snapping taut, the stretch fails, and a falling ensues, back into dukkha. The addict becomes devoted to this cycle, this re-acting, again and again and again.
The Way of Addiction, this particular shape of a life, lived by many, millions, manifests in myriad forms, subtle and coarse, as too much: re-drinking, re-drugging, re-gambling, re-sexing, re-eating, re-shopping, re-working, re-screening. Some behaviors qualitatively destructive, others made so through quantity, all are characterized by the addict’s re-acting.
When dukkha is felt, the addict jumps, re-acts, into some perceived solace.
At Hazelton, Frey’s character makes the elemental, essential movement, shift, from his default choice to conscious choosing. So too his fellow patients each, all likewise have stopped re-acting, and in so doing, have chosen another way, path, route.
Frey’s character distinguishes himself from the others, who accept the program prescribed. While no longer re-acting, no longer jumping out of dukkha into behavior known, again and again and again, they have jumped nevertheless, onto a path clearly delineated, oft trod by others. They have chosen a path of prescription.
The movement away from dukkha to a path prescribed is the Way of Conformity: to choose without much in the way of self-determination or freedom.
Frey’s character remarks that his new found fellows at Hazelton had exchanged one addiction for another, and declines to follow suit. He refuses to give responsibility away, the first “step.” He chooses to own, to remain with his suffering, his dukkha.
8. The Ways of Addiction and Conformity
In a passage from the Dao De Ching, Lao Tzu, the work’s author, poet, describes, as a kind of wisdom, the ability to tolerate chaos, to sit with it, in it, not jumping out.
“The sage,” he writes, is “as chaotic as a muddy torrent.”
The simile shocks, strikes against the common imagining of the sage as serene, the calmest of souls. And so the poet, understanding his insight, his phrasing to be counterintuitive, intercedes:
“Why ‘chaotic as a muddy torrent’?”
And gives as answer:
“Because clarity is learned by being patient in the heart of chaos.”
The word patient finds definition as an adjective describing “the capacity to accept or tolerate,” and has in its Latin root patientem the meaning “suffering”: “patience” as “suffering,” “suffering as patience.”
Because clarity is learned by suffering in the heart of chaos. Suffering through the heart of chaos.
Lao Tzu continues:
“Tolerating disarray, remaining at rest, gradually one learns to allow muddy water to settle, and proper responses to reveal themselves.”
Rather than jumping out, either into behavior re-acted, the Way of Addiction, or behavior prescribed, the Way of Conformity, the Dao counsels remaining at rest...
Waiting.
The sage is as chaotic as a muddy torrent.
To excavate, turn over, ruminate on this curious teaching reveals that the proper response to dukkha can come only from a place of patience, as a way of accepting, tolerating dukkha. At the core of addiction, at its root, lay precisely the inability to suffer through dukkha, to not jump out into whichever behavior re-acted and re-acted and re-acted, again and again and again.
For Frey’s character, for any addict, in the moment when dukkha presents itself, so too comes a need to flee from the pain, to turn to behavior well rutted.
The label “addict” most often affixes to those who turn to alcohol or illicit drugs. Certainly Frey’s character falls into this category. So too, however, it can attach to those attached to any of many behavioral addictions. In each case, the addict falls into the same pattern of re-acting.
The Way of Addiction: to re-act without much in the way of self-control or self-determination.
But the problem of dukkha extends beyond those culturally labeled as addicts. It touches everyone, affects all. Moral judgement does not apply.
The Buddha made the understanding of the nature of dukkha central to his dharma, teaching that uneasiness, anxiety, stress, discontentedness, suffering binds itself up with, in, the nature of reality as normally perceived, as experienced by default. Such that everyone experiences dukkha. Such that everyone seeks to overcome dukkha, in some way, fashion or another.
Many of us, in the movement away from dukkha, choose culturally prescribed paths, various socially sanctioned ways well worn by others, known routes.
The Way of Conformity: to choose without much in the way of self-determination or freedom.
An informal taxonomy of these routes fixed, approved by culture, ways inherited, can be described.
Religion: many follow the path of the major religions of the West and East, which offer freedom from dukkha, the finding of peace, through faith in a particular savior, adherence to a particular dogma, participation in a particular ritual.
Love: most follow the path of love, searching for peace and happiness in and through relationship with others, the love of a romantic partner, the love of family, the love of friends.
Acquisition: many in our culture seek solace and security through attempting to accumulate money and possessions, as we are taught to do, at every turn.
Work: some follow the path of creative work, seeking the satisfaction of collaboration, of creating together, combined perhaps with the adoration of strangers, gained through accomplishment and achievement.
Practice: a few follow the way of practice, to lose oneself, to find “flow,” in sport or the arts.
In the face of dukkha, for most, to turn to religion, or love, or work, or acquisition, or practice, one or some combination of these seems the most natural and healthy of choices.
9. Escape Routes (From) (And) Reality As It Is
The Buddhist nun, author, teacher Pema Chodron, in her delightful book Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, gives the name “escape routes” to the myriad ways out of dukkha, the many paths taken in moments of uncertainty, hurt.
Escape routes taken out of pain, the jumps made away from dukkha, into the Way of Addiction: to have a drink, to take a drug, to make a gamble, to start a fight, to quest for sex, to overindulge with food.
Escape routes taken out of pain, the jumps made away from dukkha, into the Way of Conformity: to prove oneself through work, to validate oneself through romance, to transcend oneself through worship, to secure oneself through acquisition and consumption, to forget oneself through practice.
While, in moments of pain, most choose some escape route, Chodron, instead, counsels, like Lao Tzu, patience. She writes, “Do not act out of confusion.”
What does this mean?
To not act out of confusion is to wait, to let the muddy torrent clear before doing anything.
When one feels most compelled to escape hurt, suffering, pain, anxiety, one exists then in a state of confusion. Experiencing dukkha in fact represents a state of confusion. The hurt, pain, suffering, acute and overwhelming or subtle yet palpable, indicates a confused misperceiving and misunderstanding of reality.
To jump in that moment, out of confusion, to escape via some route, reactive or prescribed, prevents, blocks the possibility for proper responses to reveal themselves... for reality… as… it… is to emerge.
With the jump, that confused act, experienced as natural, reality becomes patterned over by behavior, as a field of trees by a concrete lot.
The point, the challenge, the opportunity in these moments of feeling dukkha, instantaneous or extended over time? I believe it is this: to let reality as it is emerge. Otherwise, how is one to know its nature?
10. Darshana
Reality exists, coheres, for most, as story: a complex tale writ, told, shown, read, heard, seen. A collection of ideas, as proffered, ingested, digested to become real, believed to be true. Reality, in reality, is a story of reality.
In our present era, many stories, varied realities coexist, so many tales on a shelf, each there for the taking. With so much possibility, we might believe anything, or nothing, in this, the postmodern world: choose your own adventure.
Within the variation, from it, certain stories prevail in America, stories that hold most sway, through time, namely, the Story of Christianity, the Story of Capitalism, and the Story of Science. Histories told of these stories will vary, depending on biases and orientation, on expertise and motivation. Inputs and outcomes excluded in one telling might find highlighted expression in another. Value judgements may swing this way or that, in any particular moment, from group to group, and as culture changes, evolves or devolves. In any telling, there is some abstraction, simplification, of necessity.
Elements of these stories, however, moreover, can be understood as having combined, over time, in particular fashion, to create a defining way of the world, a particularly American worldview. This worldview provides guideposts along the Way of Conformity: the stories, thoughts, feelings, behaviors to which we conform. It provides the content of, for the Way of Conformity: to choose without much in the way of self-determination or freedom.
Eastern spiritual traditions use the Sanskrit word darshana to express the idea and importance of worldview. The scholar, practitioner of Shaiva Tantra, author Christopher Wallis, in his landmark book Tantra Illuminated, explains that, on the one hand, darshana means view, and, on the other, it means path. With darshana, view and path cannot be separated: one’s view of reality determines the path one will walk in life. In this sense, darshana and worldview alike represent a vision for, the story of reality, a particular way of understanding that serves as map for the path one will walk in life.
In modern-day America, the “default” worldview, darshana, view and path, has its fountainhead in the Story of Christianity, courses through the Story of Capitalism, continues into the Story of Science. These together combine to create a worldview, a darshana, which has at its core, ultimately as its core, the concept of separateness, of separation.