A few words in honor of the memory of Jeremy Safran Barry Magid May 12^th 2018

I want to offer a few words in honor of the memory of my friend and colleague, Jeremy Safran, who was brutally murdered by an intruder in his home earlier this week. It is a sudden loss that shocked people all around the world, and words of condolence, sadness, have come in all week from many, many people.

Some of you may be familiar with Jeremy’s work through the book he edited on Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue. I believe that came out in 2003, after many, many years of preparation. He had asked me to contribute a chapter to that, and that chapter formed the basis for my first book, Ordinary Mind, and it took Jeremy so long to herd all the contributors together in his edited volume, by the time it appeared I expanded my chapter into a book and had it published already. That’s how things happen in the publishing world. But I was very grateful to him for the impetus to write that.

He was naturally a connector of bringing people of divergent views together, and that book was a product of that attempt to create dialog between analysts and Buddhist practitioners. But he did that in many other spheres as well, particularly building bridges between people involved in clinical therapeutic work and those involved in doing research, those who were involved with psychodynamic therapy and those who did cognitive-behavior therapy. He was really able to speak to a great number of different people on their own terms and bring them together. He was very open minded and he had a real talent for dialog. He was quite special.

After something like this happens, we may naturally ask what our practice tells us about how to face such a loss. We might even wonder what our practice would offer us if we, like Jeremy, were faced with a murderous intruder. How would we handle ourselves? What good would our practice be to us in that moment? To the rest of us, it’s a question of how do we understand such an event? How do we process such a loss?

Death befell Jeremy in a sudden and unexpected way, without any opportunity to prepare or control the situation. I also had experience of loss befalling my wife Deborah, when her plane crashed down from the sky in 1994. Something suddenly, inexplicably, randomly, just happens. And in the aftermath of her death, I remember talking to Joko, and saying to her, that the one thing I never wanted to hear coming out of her mouth was how this death makes sense in some bigger plan, that it was some part of the dharma or anything like that. This practice must mean we’re prepared to face the full reality of chance in our life, of change in our lives, of the complete lack of control we sometimes have over life and death.

Joko was very fond of the image of the unmoored rowboat, the story, the parable, you’re in a rowboat gently going along in the lake, rowing, and because you’re in a rowboat, you’re facing backwards from the direction you’re going in, and after going along smoothly for a while, all of a sudden you bang into something, and your first reaction is to curse and say, Who ran into me? Then you turn around and you see that another rowboat has gotten untied from the dock and has just been drifting through the lake, and there’s nobody in it. There’s nobody to blame, nobody to get angry at. Joko always used to like to tell that story of how, when you see suddenly that the rowboat is empty, where does your anger go? Where does the protest go? It just happens.

So, in one sense, a knife-wielding intruder, a plane falling out of the sky, a genetic mutation suddenly turning cancerous, are all empty rowboats, things that are completely out of our control have bumped into us. There is so much of our practice that involves simply being able to accept or acknowledge that reality. I think it’s important to say that that’s not the only perspective we can take on such things. It’s not that we have to feel that practice makes us passive or helpless in the face of what befall us. We can take agency in trying to prevent crime, we can take agency in learning about airline safety or cancer research. There are all sorts of ways in which we can mobilize our attention and our efforts and our resources to not feel helpless.

And yet at the end of the day there is always a dimension where we simply have to be able to accept that there are going to be great aspects of life, the most crucial ones, that are completely out of our control. Almost inevitably we come to practice wanting to escape that realization. We want practice to give us a kind of equanimity or sense of self-control that will protect us no matter what happens.

Socrates claimed that a good man cannot be harmed, even as the Athenians were unjustly putting him to death. He said, This too is an opportunity for me to teach philosophy, to show what I’ve learned, to practice what I preach. I think that many of us have a fantasy that practice or philosophy offers this place of freedom from whatever will befall us. Yet even if we think that Socrates was not harmed by people putting him to death, there’s no escaping that a small child is harmed by the loss of a parent, or the community is harmed by the loss of a friend, a teacher like Jeremy. There’s nothing we can do or practice or realize that will make us impervious to that kind of loss, and I’m not sure that we should aspire to that. It would be almost inhuman.

In our discussion group later today, we’ll talk about the koan, Seijo and her Soul are Separated. In the commentary to that koan, Mumon exhorts his monks, saying that they must solve the great dilemma of life and death, and if they don’t, when they come to die, they’ll be like a crab flailing all it’s legs as it’s about to be plunged into a pot of boiling water. What will you do then? he said. What is your practice supposed to teach you about that moment? What will you do when you realize that death and the boiling water are inescapable?