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developmental trauma. In his gentle, caring, but unsparing and unsentimental way, the Baba’s retort helped bring Ginsberg’s self-identification as a wounded soul into awareness. He focused all of his light on Ginsberg’s darkest spot. The wounded nature of Ginsberg’s self, originating perhaps in the childhood loss of his mother to psychosis but fed by the lability of his relationship with Orlovsky, may have been fundamental to Ginsberg’s identity, but it was not something he had yet completely admitted to. Of note is the Baba’s refusal to try to do anything about Ginsberg’s plight. He did not counsel Ginsberg about his true nature, he did not urge him to meditate the feelings away, nor did he try to fill the emptiness of Ginsberg’s soul. He simply noted the truth compassionately. To progress on the spiritual path, Ginsberg, who some years later embraced Buddhism, had to start where he was.
    The observational posture that Buddhist psychology counsels is sometimes called bare attention. Its nakedness refers to the absence of reactivity in its response, to its pure and unadorned relatedness. Bare attention has been defined as the “clear and single-minded awareness of what happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception.” 11 In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, this is sometimes evoked through the setting up of what is called a spy consciousness in the corner of the mind, watching or feeling everything that unfolds in the theater of the mind and body. Sometimes called mindfulness, it is described using metaphors ranging from climbing a tall water tower to look down from above to acting like a surgeon’s probe, going deep into the afflicted area. This combination of detachment and engagement is characteristic of the attentional stance that is recommended. Bare attention also has a quality of renunciation to it. It asks us to defer our usual reactions in the service of something less egocentric; the instructions are not to cling to what is pleasant and not to reject what is unpleasant—to simply be with things as they are. If reactions occur (which they inevitably do), they too become grist for the mill, but they are never privileged. The idea is to let them settle down so that things can be known simply for what they are. This quality of renunciation is critical to the Buddha’s method; it is what he learned from his six years of ascetic practices in the forest.
    One of the central paradoxes of Buddhism is that the bare attention of the meditative mind changes the psyche by not trying to change anything at all. The steady application of the meditative posture, like the steadiness of an attuned parent, allows something inherent in the mind’s potential to emerge, and it emerges naturally if left alone properly in a good enough way. When the Dalai Lama summarized his scholarly teachings on Buddhist thought with the paradoxical injunction “Transform your thoughts but remain as you are,” he was pointing to this phenomenon. The thoughts he was after are rooted in the way we seek relief by finding someone or something to blame. The trauma within prompts us to search for a culprit, and we all too often attack ourselves or our loved ones in an attempt to eradicate the problem. This splitting of the self against itself or against its world only perpetuates suffering. The Buddha’s method was to do something out of the ordinary, to make his mind like that of a mother: the most taken-for-granted person in our world but the missing ingredient in his. Adopting this stance creates room for a transformation that is waiting to happen, one that cannot occur unless one’s inner environment is recalibrated in a specific way.
    This understanding is not entirely outside the range of contemporary psychotherapy. It was articulated with great care by one of the first therapists to actually observe mothers interacting with their infants in a clinical setting. D. W. Winnicott, a British pediatrician and child