Chapter One
Going on Being
There is a story that has kept popping up in my work over the years that
embodies much of what I have learned about how people change. It is a story that
has served a number of different functions as I have wrestled with the sometimes
competing worldviews of Buddhism and psychotherapy, but it ultimately points the
way toward their integration. It is one of the tales of Nasruddin, a Sufi
amalgam of wise man and fool, with whom I have sometimes identified and by whom
I have at other times been puzzled. He has the peculiar gift of both acting out
our basic confusion and at the same time opening us up to our deeper wisdom. I
first heard this story many years ago from one of my first meditation teachers,
Joseph Goldstein, who used it as an example of how people search for happiness
in inherently fleeting, and therefore unsatisfactory, pleasant feelings. The
story is about how some people came upon Nasr ...
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