Dear Patrick: Life Is Tough--Here's Some Good Advice

By Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Annie Gottlieb

Dear Patrick,

For five years I have been witness to your struggles to grow up without a father. As a family friend, I can't make that up to you. What I can do is stand by you, and teach you how to be the kind of man you wish your father had been ...

So begins the correspondence of two unlikely friends, Patrick Buckley, a sixteen-year-old New York City high schooler, and Jeffrey M. Schwartz, internationally renowned neuroscientist and the critically acclaimed author of Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain. Inspired by Patrick's straight forward questions, Schwartz examines the moral teachings of our greatest spiritual leaders -- Jesus, Buddha, and Moses -- and filters them through the lens of his cutting-edge psychiatric research, as well as his own experiences of childhood loneliness and loss. With fierce certainty and love, Schwartz provides Patrick with a blueprint for breaking free from the culture of corrosive cynicism that threatens to destroy him, and for constructing a decent, meaningful, and fulfilling life. The result is a fascinating and revolutionary new code for living born of a man and a boy who sought honor and self-command in a culture of self-indulgence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780061961953

Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Jeffrey M. Schwartz M.D. is an internationally-recognized authority on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and is the author of the bestseller Brain Lock. He is a Research Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Book preview

DEAR PATRICK

LIFE IS HARD–

HERE’S SOME GOOD ADVICE

JEFFREY M. SCHWARTZ, M.D.

and Patrick Buckley with Annie Gottlieb

Previously published under the title

A Return to Innocence

For Steve Wasserman

Requiescat In Pace

Though a thousand times a thousand men are conquered by one in battle, the one who conquers himself is truly the master of battle.

—GOTAMA BUDDHA, Dhammapada 103

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

—EDMUND BURKE,

A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

May all beings’ hearts rejoice.

—GOTAMA BUDDHA, Mettā Sutta (Loving-Kindness Discourse)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

WRESTLING FOR MY SOUL

THANKS FOR THE DISCIPLINE

YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN

STRENGTHENING YOUR BRAIN

RECOVERING INNOCENCE IN A CYNIC AL AGE

REGIMEN FOR A STRONG MIND

TRASH TALK

THE OTHER F-WORD

IN PRAISE OF EMBARRASSMENT

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

THE INTOXICATED SOCIETY

THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS

BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM

RAPPERS, POETS, AND PROPHETS

A FATHER’S PRAYER

HOW TO BE A HERO

TRAINING YOUR MENTAL FORCE I: THE POWER OF MINDFULNESS

MEET YOUR VEHICLE

VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE: ANIMALS VS. HUMANS

HERESY TODAY, DOGMA TOMORROW OR THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE

MENTAL FORCE: YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN

MINDFULNESS AND WISE ATTENTION

MEET YOUR NAVIGATOR

TRUE AND FALSE FRIENDS

RESISTING THE CALL OF THE PACK

ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

THE GUARDIANS OF THE WORLD

SPIDERSENSE VS. THE FORCES OF EVIL

COURAGE AND THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

WHAT IS TRUE FREEDOM?

TRAINING YOUR MENTAL FORCE II: THE OWNERS MANUAL FOR YOUR BRAIN

YOUR OLD BRAIN: THE DRIVESHAFT

THE COSMIC BATTLE FOR YOUR BRAINPOWER

THE ENEMY WITHIN

THE THREE ROOTS OF EVIL: GREED, ILL-WILL, AND IGNORANCE

THE SUBLIME MODES OF LIVING

THE ANIMAL SOUL VS. THE DIVINE SOUL

THE GROWL OF THE BEAST

PROGRAMMING YOUR BRAIN’S HABIT SYSTEM

USING YOUR MIND TO CHANGE YOUR BRAIN

IT’S NOT HOW YOU FEEL. IT’S WHAT YOU DO THAT COUNTS

THE ROAD WARRIOR’S GUIDEBOOK

MENTORS AND ROLE MODELS

THE STRIKING FORCE OF DARKNESS

DEADLY TEAMWORK: TWO CASE STUDIES

ANOTHER KIND OF KĀMA SUTRA

SLOTH AND ENVY MEET LUST AND PRIDE

LOVE’S RUGGED ROAD

PROTECTING YOURSELF—AND OTHERS—IN LOVE

FREEDOM’S PRICE

KARMA AND REDEMPTION

A BLESSING FOR THE JOURNEY

GLOSSARY

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT

Books by Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Copyright

About the Publisher

WRESTLING FOR MY SOUL

THANKS FOR THE DISCIPLINE

Dear Patrick,

It was good to talk to you on the phone last night. I’m sorry to hear that broken promises is such an ongoing theme in your relationship with your dad—that time and again, as you put it, he says he’s going to do something, and then he doesn’t do it. But I’m very glad he called you on your birthday—that much ceremony, at least, he can still get it together to observe. Most of all, I’m glad you’re taking me up on my birthday offer.

By beginning this conversation, we’re actually resuming, in a whole new way, a transmission of ideas from generation to generation that was held sacred until just one or two generations ago. (It’s no coincidence that that’s also when our families and communities really started falling apart.) The ideas we’ll be talking about—which are nothing less than the operating instructions for human nature—are timeless, but for their eternal relevance to shine forth, they need to be freshly applied to the new circumstances of each generation. (Showing that these great ideas are still the main source of spiritual power, even in an age of science and technology, is the only way to restore them to their rightful place as life’s true foundation.) That’s why your part in this dialogue is so important. I can reconnect you to the power source of three thousand years of wisdom, but you’re the one who’s going to have to ground it in the urgent concerns of a young person living right now, at the beginning of a new millennium.

If that sounds like a setup—like I’m going to expect long letters from you—don’t worry. I know how busy you are, with swimming, football, and now crew, too, on top of all your classes. I also know you and letter-writing—I’ve gotten a few of your one-liners over the years! It’s not a problem. There’s a gem of a line in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet: Brevity is the soul of wit. So it’s fine with me if you weigh in now and then by phone, post card, or E-mail, in twenty-five words or less!

Meanwhile, I’ll start by telling you how I found my way, as much out of sheer desperation as anything else, to the sources of wise guidance that I’ll be sharing with you. The story begins when I was almost exactly your age, and—this might surprise you—athletics play an important part in it.

You expressed some concern last night over whether all your sports will leave you enough time for studying. So far, you seem to be handling it, according to your mom. Your rowing coach, who’s also your biology teacher, says you’re doing great at both. To my mind, that’s probably no coincidence. Academics provide the content of education, but good athletic training builds a strong and capable container! Your passion for athletics will actually make my job easier, because your experience of training your body will give you a head start in understanding what I have to say about training your mind and character.

I was a wrestler in high school, and what I learned from it has served me all my life. When my coach, Bill Linkner, retired two years ago, over thirty years’ worth of former wrestlers and football players gave him a big testimonial dinner. One of the gifts was a poster-size picture of him, which we all signed. What I wrote on that picture was, Thanks forthe discipline. Because that discipline formed the foundation for everything I’ve accomplished since. To this day, everything I do contains some element of what I learned as a wrestler.

Near the end of that evening, when we were presenting our coach the gifts we’d gotten for him, one of my old teammates said to me, You know, if Coach Linkner had asked you to die for the team back then, you wouldn’t be here to see this. And I said, You know, you’re right. It’s well understood now that that’s how soldiers fight, how they can face death in combat without batting an eye. They do it for each other, and their common goal. It’s about identity and connectedness with your buddies, your platoon, doing well for them, earning their respect and esteem. Clearly, Patrick, you’re experiencing that right now—from what you tell me, especially on the rowing team. And I’m proud to say that’s what my teammates most remembered about me. They used to joke that if Coach Linkner told me, Go run through that brick wall, I’d try. There were definitely better wrestlers than me on the team, but no one was more dedicated. I’m not exaggerating when I say that when I was your age wrestling was more important to me than life itself. I may not have been too wise, but no one who was there would deny that I was brave.

Most adolescents devote themselves tosomething with that kind of life-or-death intensity, and for a good reason. You are, in reality, dying as a child and being reborn as a young adult. If society doesn’t assist that passage with a rigorous, transforming challenge—and outside of the military, athletics is almost the last one we’ve got left—kids will often act it out in tragically self-destructive ways, like drinking and driving, gangs, or drugs. I vividly remember saying something back then that sums up in one line how much wrestling meant to me. A friend from another school had told me that his football coach liked to say that soccer (which I also played) was only agame, but football was a sport. (Americans have acquired more respect for soccer since then!) I replied, "Well, you tell your coach that maybe soccer is only a game, and football is a sport, but wrestling is a religion!"

On that note, I’ll send you back to the sacred rites of rowing and continue this story tomorrow!

Your friend,

Jeff

… and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN

Dear Patrick,

When I said Wrestling is a religion, and I said it more than once in high school, I was saying something all dedicated athletes come to know, something I’m sure you’ve already had a taste of: the all-out physical and mental effort that you make when you strive for excellence can lift you beyond your ordinary self, into a clarity and freedom that partakes of the spiritual realm. But I suspect it goes even deeper than that—I was probably also remembering (at least subconsciously) one of the most powerful and mysterious initiation images of the Jewish faith I was born into—an image in which religion is wrestling!

This is how the Book of Genesis tells it:

And Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And [Jacob] said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for thou hast striven with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

When I was very young, I read that story of a man who grapples with God, and who wins his name and a name for his whole people, in my grandfather’s big Old Testament. (I can still see that big Bible, which sat on a little table next to his easy chair.) And maybe it planted a seed that would take root in my mind when I was sixteen and wrestling for my own identity and blessing. Jacob was left alone: I surecould relate to that at sixteen. Outside the gym, I was very alienated and lonely. Socially I didn’t know how to play the game, and refused to learn. (If this rumor that you’ve got a girlfriend is true, you’re way ahead of me. At your age, I had had zero dates.) And as far as having a role model for learning that kind of thing—well, for whatever reason, I just didn’t seem to make contact with anyone on that level. Mostly I just felt very alone.

Emotionally, it sometimes felt like I never had a father—even though, like most fathers of the World War II generation, mine was there physically during my childhood. (He left my mother when I was not much older than you.) And there’s no denying that he worked like hell to support us with all the material benefits he never had. In a very real sense that made it much harder to understand what was missing. He certainly wasn’t a deadbeat, a drunk, or a bum. His attitude was Hey, I’m really there for you, you can always count on me, and in the material realm, it was definitely true. But he believed—he still believes—that if a father fulfills the material-provider role, he has done everything a father needs to do.

It was the classic mistake of his generation, the World War II generation. Now, I hesitate to say anything critical about a generation that survived the Depression, defeated Hitler, and gave my own postwar baby-boom generation a life of security, affluence, and education never before seen on Planet Earth. For any of us to talk about their mistakes (much less to rant and scream about them, as many college kids did in the 1960s) is in bad taste, because in the things that turn out to matter most—like sticking by your loved ones and keeping your word—their record is so much better than ours. Or at least, it was until we reached adolescence, launched our so-called cultural revolution, and started corrupting them!

It’s one of the saddest ironies of recent history, and one you don’t hear too much about, that quite a few members ofthat heroic generation wound up envying and imitating the orgy of self-gratification their own labors had made possible for their children. By the time the Me Generation of the ‘70s rolled around, it seemed like everybody and their uncle (especially my uncle, as you’ll see!) wanted to get it on with the Free Love thing. There was more than a little gray hair hanging over collars onto love beads in those days, and a sudden rash of midlife liberation divorces among people who had once said Till death do us part and meant it. If the moral flabbiness and general sense of entitlement that has infected this country since the late ‘60s had been half as prevalent in the early ‘40s, we’d probably all be speaking German and Japanese today!

Fortunately, when the world hung in the balance, the vast majority of my parents’ generation were the original promise keepers. They did not hesitate to sacrifice their own personal gratification for the sake of family and country—sacrifices, paradoxically, that often brought them a deeper and more lasting gratification than today’s self-fulfillment seekers will probably ever know. And plenty of them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, have kept the faith. Your mom gave me a copy of the eulogy she wrote for her late uncle Eddie, your great-uncle and her godfather, Edward Imprescia. Her description of him holds true for many members of an amazing generation. There are millions for whom this eulogy could be recited:

By his own example he taught me, and all of us, everything we needed to know to live a life of goodness and generosity—as a loving and dutiful husband for fifty years, as a committed and loving father, as a courageous warrior in World War II, as a thoughtful and generous neighbor…. This was a man who knew how to give and he gave with no conditions. This was a man with supreme humility.

That said, however, and Uncle Eddie aside, I believe something crucial had already been lost from the heart ofthe World War II generation’s giving and promise-keeping, and that was the ultimate reason why—what it’s really all for. The words generation gap weren’t coined until the ‘60s, but a very significant gap had already opened up between the World War II generation and their parents, which set the stage for all the trouble that was to come. In many families, tradition—the inseparable weave of religious belief and social custom that had always given human life its form and meaning—had suddenly lost its hold. This was easiest to see in immigrant families like mine, where the first American-born generation, eager to be modern and not to seem foreign, jettisoned, and sometimes even scorned, many of their parents’ Old World ways. My mother has confided to me how embarrassed she was, when she was growing up, by my grandmother’s broken English and Eastern European customs—a reaction that, while very understandable, is also quite sad. So interwoven was dying custom with life-giving faith that the baby was often thrown out with the bathwater, and many children of devout immigrants became proudly secular, generic Americans.

But they weren’t the only ones. For in a very real sense, every American, and perhaps every Westerner, in the first half of the twentieth century was an immigrant—from an Old World shaped by tradition to a new one shaped by science and technology; from a world ruled by God’s power to one dominated by man’s rapidly growing power; from a world infused with potent Spirit to one made of readily manipulated matter. As the nineteenth century ended, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared God is dead. Humanity, beginning to take charge of its own destiny, felt it no longer needed a Father to guide it. (Freud, in what I consider to be the stupidest thing he ever did, actually dared to call God the Father an illusion!)

Material progress became the new god, the motivating engine at the center of modern life. So the momentum ofthe old promises continued to shape the World War II generation’s conduct—and they dutifully and devotedly cared for their families. But they did so not as their elders had, to perpetuate the service of God, or to honor and be blessed by the eternal order of the universe, but to give their children a better, more comfortable life.

It was a goal that the baby boomers, even as we arrogantly took it as our due, correctly sensed to be spiritually void. (It would be comic, if it weren’t so tragic, to watch a substantial segment of my generation try to revive spirituality without displacing themselves from the center of the universe.) Without any transcendent purpose, our parents’ self-sacrifice for our sake seemed somehow hollow and pointless—and perhaps, by 1970, some of them thought so, too.

My father spent his whole life in New York City’s garment center, a hard place where most people get wised up, not wise. He worked like a dog (and the garment center being what it is, he also got treated like one!), all to fulfill the material-provider role up to the call of duty and beyond. Like so many parents of today, his mind was almost totally focused on making a buck (as he called it)—which always was justified, and sincerely so, by giving the kids a better life. It was more than just the necessities: whatever desires I had, he fulfilled. If I needed money—even money he thought shouldn’t be spent—hey, no problem. (He had a genuinely morbid fear of being accused of denying me!) What had somehow gotten lost in the accelerating progress of American culture was that there are huge aspects of a better life that making a buck simply can’t provide. When I needed the guidance that comes from genuine wisdom, or the kind of support that can only be grounded in personal honor and moral courage—my father didn’t have it to give.

His older brother, Aaron, on the other hand, was all too eager to provide guidance, albeit of a somewhat differentkind. My uncle was a charming con man and bunko artist. (He used to travel under the alias Al Grace—what a joke!) However, truth be told, he was also my father’s idol and role model, the one person on earth he most wanted to please. Would you like to hear the timeless wisdom my Uncle Aaron imparted to me around the time of my sixteenth birthday?

Kid, he said, listen good, because I’m going to tell you something you better remember for the rest of your life. (I assure you he got my full attention with that intro!)

If you find a friend

That’s true and blue,

Make sure you screw him

Before he screws you.

I remember the feeling of simultaneous confusion and disgust that he elicited with that little rhyme. If you can relate to my feeling like I’d been sucker-punched in the stomach, you’ll begin to understand why, when I thought about wrestling with the great questions on the threshold of adulthood, a little voice inside me said, Face it, sonny boy, you’re on your own. No coach, no seconds. I faced those big challenges like Jacob did, alone.

And yet, somewhere deep in my consciousness was that vivid and saving memory of reading the Old Testament with my grandfather, my mother’s father. Tomorrow, I’ll write you about him.

Your friend,

Jeff

STRENGTHENING YOUR BRAIN

Dear Patrick,

Grandfathers, like your mom’s Sicilian one, who I know she was close to, are often our only link to the lost world that had fathers as its backbone.

My maternal grandfather was in many ways the exact opposite of my father: a gentle and devout man who had suffered terrible losses in his life. I wish he’d been a stronger counterforce to the brash hollow men on my father’s side, but he was the one close relative I made real emotional contact with, and the only one who gave me any kind of spiritual foundation. My grandfather had had a formal Jewish education in Europe, and he could have become a rabbi, but he immigrated here, giving up that dream for the American dream of safety and security. Instead, he became an upholsterer. He lived above his shop on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens. I used to sit up there and study the Bible with him. That was my first exposure to words of power and wisdom, to the force of truth that transcends the merely human.

It must have been very important to my grandfather to pass his heritage on to me. I am named after his youngest brother, whom he really loved and admired. (Our Hebrew names are both Yaacov—Jacob—just like that Jewish wrestler in Genesis!) When my grandfather came to America with one brother and one sister, that young brother and five others were left behind, and they all perished. They kept up a close correspondence until just before Hitler marched into Poland. The last letter, my mother remembers, arrived just before Labor Day weekend, 1939. She vividly recalls how upset and worried my grandfather became the instant the news of the Nazi invasion of Poland flashed on the radio. I told them not to stay. I told them to get out of there, hesaid. Then the letters stopped, and none of them was ever seen again. There is no record of what happened to them. They probably were shot; before the death factories were built, many thousands of Jews were simply rounded up and shot execution style, then thrown into mass graves.

All that unspoken memory, and all of his unfulfilled rabbinical calling, my grandfather poured into preparing me for my Orthodox Bar Mitzvah when I was thirteen. He trained me in the traditional way, and he performed the first half of the service. I memorized and recited the entire second half, in Hebrew. It all took a lot of effort and concentration, but going through that formal training in the years leading up to age thirteen gave me lifelong discipline of the mind. A year or two later wrestling would begin to add discipline of the body. Those two initiatory challenges—one cerebral, the other athletic—shaped my character, and became the twin foundations of my life.

Both disciplines would be a great advantage to me later on, in my twenties, when I began the serious study of Buddhism and Yoga that I continue to this day. The flexibility and pain tolerance I had developed as a wrestler would make it possible (though not easy at first) for me to do meditation sitting in the full lotus position—legs fully crossed, each foot on the opposite thigh. I have done that for at least an hour every morning for over twenty years. And by memorizing and reciting the Hebrew for my Bar Mitzvah, it turns out, I had wired my own brain to be able to memorize and chant entire sermons of the Buddha in their ancient language, Pali.

Now, you might ask, why wasn’t I just wiring my brain for more Hebrew? If all the great religious traditions refer to the same ultimate truth (and I am convinced that they do, though they use different approaches), why did I feel the need to seek outside my own heritage, especially when I was my grandfather’s hope for continuity? That is a very fair question—one often asked of American Jews and Christians who have been drawn to Buddhism (and for that matter, of Jews who admire the teachings of Jesus Christ, among whom I also count myself). I can only give you my own answers, which go back to that biblical image of Jacob alone in the desert, wrestling for his spiritual life.

That’s me, doing meditation in full lotus position.

First of all, I have never left my heritage. I consider myself a Jew who practices Buddhist mindfulness meditation and studies Buddhist and Christian philosophy from their original sources. In all the years I have visited and meditated in Buddhist monasteries and temples, I have never once bowed before a statue of the Buddha, even when deeplyobservant Burmese laymen and Buddhist monks all