Platek: For those of us who pursue a spiritual practice, there can be a sense of shame or failure when we feel sad or afraid; if we were enlightened enough, we think, we’d always approach life with a calm, loving heart.

Greenspan: Yes, we carry this mistaken belief that enlightenment means we do not suffer anymore. But it is possible to suffer with a calm, loving heart. These two are not mutually exclusive. Enlightenment for me is about growing in compassion, and compassion means “suffering with.” Enlightenment has something to do with not running from our own pain or the pain of others. When we don’t turn away from pain, we open our hearts and are more able to connect to the best part of ourselves and others — because every human being knows pain. I’m not sure what enlightenment is, but I’m sure it has something to do with turning pain into love.

People with a spiritual practice sometimes try to “transcend” suffering. I call this a “spiritual bypass.” It’s different from what your friend did: focusing on the positive while going through chemotherapy. That was essential to his survival. A spiritual bypass is not a conscious choice; it’s avoiding difficult feelings by “rising above” them, when we are really not above them at all: To truly rise above, most of the time, we must go through. I think there is such a thing as genuine transcendence, but in my experience it is most often a form of grace; we can’t make it happen. A spiritual bypass is a kind of false transcendence. Some New Age ideas carry this flavor: they deny the evils of the world and claim that only love and light are real. This amounts to a dismissal of the pain of millions of people.

Platek: Psychologist James Hillman has said, “We cannot be cured apart from the planet.” You point out that our psychological theories — and perhaps some of our spiritual ones as well — emphasize individualism to the point that we have become myopic. Our world is suffering while we struggle to fix ourselves.

Greenspan: One of the main aspects of this myopia is that we don’t see the connection between our “personal” sorrow, fear, and despair and the pain of the world. We think that we are totally alone in it. And the isolation makes our emotions useless to us. There’s a connection between not being able to tolerate our own pain and wanting to look away from other people’s pain and the pain of the world. But the world is always with us. Emotional energy is collective and transpersonal; our seemingly private pain is connected to the larger context that I call “emotional ecology.” I think many of us have a profound emotional sense of global crisis, of the brokenheartedness of the world, and it affects us in ways that we don’t discern.

Of course, we are only human, and sometimes we need to look away, because the pain and chaos are just too much. We numb ourselves — all of us do — to get through the day, to protect ourselves. But psychic numbing is not pleasant — we don’t really feel alive — and it deprives us of our ability to act. Each of us has some gift to give the world. When we become numb, we lose that potential, and the world loses out, too. Staying open-hearted in this era of global threat is really a challenge. Again, my parents have been my models. During the Holocaust, they saw firsthand the worst that humans can do. My father lost eight of his eleven siblings and the rest of his family. But the Holocaust did not destroy his extraordinary openheartedness. He told me once that, after the war, he considered killing some Germans and then killing himself. This was shocking to me; he was such a gentle, loving, and generous man. He had his demons to deal with, but, in the end, he chose to live and raise a family, to put his faith in life. He knew how to maintain a strong connection to the life force even in the midst of a maelstrom of hard emotions.

Platek: Even if we’re convinced of the connections between our emotional states and the state of the world, many of us would feel embarrassed to say, “I feel sad today because of the bombings in Iraq,” or, “I’m depressed because of the shrinking ice in Antarctica.”

Greenspan: True, there is no public forum in which we can make statements like this. For that matter, there is very little private space, either. This really is a hindrance — that we do not have an acceptable way to express our sorrow on behalf of the world. We can speak about specific events, like 9/11, but only for a short time, and then the topic is exhausted. There is a taboo about revealing one’s personal emotions about the world — even in a presumably receptive setting. I once took a yoga class in which we were encouraged to state our prayers at the beginning of class. Many people prayed for inner peace. One morning, after having read about the hole in the ozone layer, I prayed for the world. After class, someone angrily said to me, “Why are you bringing the world into the room?” I was baffled and told her that, as I saw it, the world was already in the room, and the room was in the world.

Platek: Does the world need us to have feelings about it?

Greenspan: I think so. When I was in retreat at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health years ago, I had this mystical experience with a beautiful tree. I call myself a “reluctant mystic,” by the way, because I’ve had so many mystical experiences, clairvoyant dreams, and visions that have come to me unbidden. Some of them haven’t been welcome, and none of them can be understood with the analytic mind.

Anyway, at Kripalu, I was walking through this lovely meadow, and I felt a gentle tapping on my shoulder. When I turned around, there was no one there, but I found myself gazing at this spectacular Camperdown-elm tree. I felt as though the tree was calling me, so off I went to it. I touched the tree and had a kind of erotic experience of interspecies communication — of exchanging life forces with it. I felt nourished by the tree and felt that I was giving nourishment in return. After a while I noticed that many of the tree’s leaves had holes in them. I was concerned that the tree might be sick in some way, so I went in search of the groundskeeper, who told me that the elm trees on the property had gotten sick and died. The community had prayed for this tree, because they loved it so much, and it was the sole survivor of the elm disease.

I grew up in the South Bronx and haven’t had extensive experience in nature, but I can tell you that communion with nature is more than just a poetic phrase. One of the most tragic things about our age is that we have lost this communion, and its wonder. With each generation, we lose more of it, and that loss is making us more and more anxious and depressed.

Platek: In your book you use the word intervulnerability.

Greenspan: When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.

Platek: Just after 9/11, the New Yorker devoted its back page to a poem by Adam Zagajewski titled “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” I’m sure I am not the only one who had that poem taped to the refrigerator for months after the attacks. In many ways, the path you propose mirrors the poem’s sentiment: we must try to love the mutilated parts of ourselves, just as we must try to love the mutilated parts of our world.

Greenspan: Our mutilated parts and those of the world are interwoven. If we have a child who is crying and needs our attention, we don’t just tell her to “stay positive.” We turn our loving attention to what’s hurting her. We may also try to distract her with an ice-cream cone or a toy, and that’s ok, too. But it’s important that we tend to the parts that are crying. There are so many wounded parts of the world right now, and they keep telling us that they need our loving attention.

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