Crucial to Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself: first, we isolate the thing that bothers us, the cause of our suffering; then we change not the object but ourselves, the way we relate to (what appears to us as) the cause of our suffering: “What was extinguished was only the false view of self. What had always been illusory was understood as such. Nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer.” This shift involves great pain; it is not merely a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous “oceanic feeling”; it is also the violent experience of losing the ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one’s being. This is why the path towards Buddhist Enlightenment begins by focusing on the most elementary feelings of “injured innocence,” of suffering an injustice without cause (the preferred topic of narcissistic, masochistic thoughts: “How could she do this to me?I don’t deserve to be treated that way”). The next step is to make the shift to the Ego itself, the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear and palpable its own fleeting and irrelevant status—the aggression directed against the object causing the suffering should be turned against the Self itself. We do not repair the damage; rather, we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which appears to need repair. …On the one side, reality remains as it is, nothing changes, it is just fully perceived as what it is, a mere insubstantial flow of phenomena that does not really affect the void at the core of our being; on the other side, the goal is to transform reality itself so that there will be no suffering in it, so that all living beings will enter nirvana.

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