E' and Buddhism (or: The chick with the weird hair won't stop staring at me!)

Okay, let's start here:

Don't look away!

I'd like to tell you something cool I discovered about the parallels between Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) and Buddhism, but I can't. Little distracted right now ... she's locked into me with her squinty, steely gaze, and if I look away for even a moment, it will give her the opportunity she needs to suck me into the book with her hair. 

What book? This one:

"New" is relative, of course.

I think she stole the hair from the smiley guy on the right and taped it to her forehead. But that's not important right now. What is important, and by "important" I mean "not really important, but interesting" is the parallel between RET - really, the precursor to cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) - and Buddhism. 

"But Grumpy Buddha," you may say, "everyone knows about the connection between cognitive behavioral therapy and Buddhism! There are a million books connecting mindfulness and CBT. Tell me something I don't know!"

Well, first of all, no need to be such a jerk about it. Whatever happened to Right Speech? Second, this goes past mere mindfulness. (Okay, there's nothing "mere" about mindfulness, but open your mind for a second.) I found two (related) parallels that are only tangentially related to mindfulness. I'll start with the less cool one, and then build to the holy-crapoli one.

First: Albert Ellis, founder of RET, posited three "Insights" one can get from Rational Emotive Therapy:

Insight 1 - People seeing and accepting the reality that their emotional disturbances at point C only partially stem from the activating events or adversities at point A that precede C.

Insight 2 - No matter how, when, and why people acquire self-defeating or irrational beliefs (i.e. beliefs which are the main cause of their dysfunctional emotional-behavioral consequences), if they are disturbed in the present, they tend to keep holding these irrational beliefs and continue upsetting themselves with these thoughts.

-- That's right, bitches. Ellis just threw the Second Noble Truth at you, in psychologese.

Insight 3 - No matter how well they have achieved insight 1 and insight 2, insight alone will rarely enable people to undo their emotional disturbances. They may feel better when they know, or think they know, how they became disturbed - since insights can give the impression of being useful and curative. But, it is unlikely that they will actually get better and stay better unless they accept insights 1 and 2, and then also go on to strongly apply insight 3: There is usually no way to get better and stay better but by: continual work and practice in looking for, and finding, one’s core irrational beliefs; actively, energetically, and scientifically disputing them; replacing one’s absolutist musts with flexible preferences; changing one's unhealthy feelings to healthy, self-helping emotions; and firmly acting against one’s dysfunctional fears and compulsions.

-- AND then, as you can see, he throws ... er, something.

What were Insights 1 and 2, again?

Okay, it's not that tough. Basically, it's Ellis's version of the Eightfold Path, and one that's not too different than the one we're familiar with. It's not difficult to see Right View, Right Intention, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration, and, most of all, Right Effort in there.

Basically, you need more than just knowing that suffering is caused by attachment. You have to practice, regularly, to make skillful choices, to reflect on one's thoughts, and to reject firm attachments to beliefs.

BUT that's not all, folks. In the intro to the 1975 edition (aka the lady with the funky hair edition), Ellis and Harper note that they rewrote it using E-prime. E-prime eliminates all forms of to be, such as is, was, am, has been, being, etc.

The benefits of E-prime line up so closely with my (admittedly naive) understanding of the "no-self" Buddhist teachings that it made my head explode.

Don't worry, I feel better now.

To be honest, I still haven't quite grasped the whole bit in Buddhism about the abnegation of self. Frankly, it sounds kind of creepy.

On the other hand, when Ellis talks about it, I feel like I can leap right on board: 

"When we use E-prime, we get rid of silly and essentially unanswerable questions, such as 'What is my destiny?' 'Who am I?'"

"When we employ E-prime, we eliminate the degree of completeness, finality, and time independence that we state or apply when we use the verb 'to be'." 

When you stop using "to be" in all its forms, it's a lot tougher to make overgeneralizations. Not impossible, but tougher. The examples throughout the book emphasize this point: in RET, the problem so much isn't that we have a Self, it's that we get extremely caught up in it, attribute permanent traits to it, and assume that it's unified at all times and places -- and that most of the suffering we inflict on ourselves is due to overattachment to self-concept, and some rather silly beliefs about what we should/must do in order to protect it or live up to it.

Nice, eh?

Well, I thought it was cool.

So did I! And my hair isn't going to consume your soul, silly. Now, look away ...